


mind field

by Granspn



Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: :), Non-Linear Narrative, Period-Typical Homophobia, Trauma, Unreliable Narrator, but it's relevant, hawkbeej endgame (natch), i'm not trying to be over the top but these are some of the themes i'm dealing with, i'm trying not to be heavy handed or voyeuristic, memory lapses, now with 100 percent more bj goes to maine, that's not what we're here for, think on the level of and related to gfa and bless you hawkeye, time jumps, unfortunately, unless you thought i thought any of this was objective, with some hawkmarg hookups along the way
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2021-01-05
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:00:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 48,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28324983
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Granspn/pseuds/Granspn
Summary: hawkeye is impossible, or so he’s been told.Part character study, part experimental non-linear narrative, part a place for me to project and put all my unnecessarily specific headcanons in one place, today we’re taking a trip through hawkeye’s chaotic train of thought after being asked a simple question: “tell me about the bus.”
Relationships: "Trapper" John McIntyre/Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce, B. J. Hunnicutt/Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce, B. J. Hunnicutt/Peg Hunnicutt (referenced), Margaret "Hot Lips" Houlihan/Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce
Comments: 45
Kudos: 64





	1. question how or when or why

**Author's Note:**

> inspired by the fact that thoughts literally enter and exit my mind at the exact same moment and I haven’t been able to sustain a train of thought in the past eight months.. this is as close as I’ve come to a representation of what that feels like bc it doesn’t feel too off the mark for our man hawkeye to be honest. Also inspired by “my life just flashed before my eyes and I didn’t like the ending”
> 
> Title is a little bit of wordplay in honor of hawkeye but also because when I was a kid I thought that's what minefields were called

“Tell me about the bus.”

“Tell me about your mother.”

“Tell me about the party.”

_Back up, Hawk. Focus. It’s only Sidney. Talk. Talk. Say something. Anything._

“The bus? We had a great day.”

“Uh-huh,” Sidney says. He doesn’t believe him, lord knows why. Hawkeye is a great actor.

“Hey, that’s my line.”

Sidney just raises his eyebrows and looks very, very disappointed. Hawkeye feels very, very sick. In his stomach, not his head, that is. He doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing here when clearly he should be in bed at the 4077th or better yet back in Maine or better yet back in time.

“Hawkeye.”

“I know, I know! The bus. Why are you so obsessed with this bus, anyway? Do you need to borrow my bus pass? Some subway tokens? You gotta give me something to get something, you know?”

Sidney contemplates the ultimatum.

“I used to find any excuse to take the M79 through the park,” he says.

Hawkeye has taken that journey more times than he can count. His roommate, in college, told him that when he was a kid he would sit in the middle of the bus and ride it like a roller coaster while it snaked through the trees and bramble between the two museums that flank Central Park. Hawkeye tries to picture it now, the black speckled floor, the blue seats, the window opened a crack from the top and he feels faint. He usually has such a vivid imagination but he can hardly conjure up a solitary image of the M79. He feels behind him for the wall and leans back.

“Maybe I’d rather walk,” he says. “Past the, uh…” he blinks. “Past Belvedere Castle and the…” _Shit_. Why can’t he remember anything? He scratches the back of his head and tries desperately to picture the park in fall, orange and red and brown, or the stream behind his house in winter, snow falling silently and sailing away, or the bus on the way to work in Marlborough, cream colored and red but everything just swims gray in his vision.

“Tell me about the bus, Hawkeye. The fourth of July.”

“The fourth of July?” he says, snapping back to reality, lucidity, sanity. “1953?”

“Please.”

“In med school I worked summers at a resort hotel on Long Island.”

“Hawkeye.”

“Every fourth of July they’d send up the most magnificent fireworks display.”

“Try and concentrate, Hawkeye, please.”

“Well, what are you getting so mad at me for?” Hawkeye says even though Sidney’s tone was nothing but gentle, and he knows that. “I’m just trapped here, you know, you should be mad at the people who locked me up for no reason… I’m always in trouble for no goddamn reason.”

When Hawkeye is eight he is a good kid. When he’s nine he meets Tommy Gillis and the terrible twosome are almost immediately unstoppable, their behavior untenable. When Hawkeye is ten his mom dies in the hospital and he stays home from school for a week and when he gets back he isn’t quiet or shy or sad like everyone thought he would be. Everyone tiptoes around him since they expect him to break, but he doesn’t. (And so it begins.) He is exactly as loud and crazy and funny and impossible to handle as before, maybe even more so. By the time he is twelve he has worn out his diplomatic immunity as such and regularly gets sent to the principal’s office to receive a tongue lashing that rolls off him like so much water off a duck’s back.

“Did you catch the game last night?” he asks the principal as they wait for his dad to show up, the English teacher finally having followed through on her perpetual threat of “I swear I’ll call your parents.”

“Ben, please.”

Some teachers call him Hawkeye, some don’t. The old principal never did and the new one doesn’t either.

“Are you allowed to smoke in here? I don’t mean me, I mean, I don’t smoke. I’m twelve. I just meant are you _allowed_ to? And even if you’re not allowed, are _you_ allowed to, ‘cause you know, you are the principal, so I thought maybe if–”

“Benjamin! Are you capable of sitting quietly for ten minutes while we wait for your father to get here?”

“I don’t know, I’ve never tried for that long.”

“Well, please. Give it your best shot.”

Hawkeye shakes his right leg. When that gets boring he shakes his left. When that gets boring his taps a rhythm on his chair’s wooden armrests and reads Principal Van Der Haven’s diploma behind him. Apparently he went to the University of Vermont.

“When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up? I’m going to be a doctor. I’m going to move to Portland and work in a big hospital with–”

“Please, let’s just have quiet!”

Hawkeye clams up and mimes zipping his mouth shut. He peers around the office but there aren’t even enough books on the shelf to make for interesting reading. He wonders if Dad is going to be mad or if he’s just going to think it’s funny. He’s not worried either way; in fact he’s about to inform Mr. Van Der Haven that there probably isn’t much point in calling his dad here since he never really gets in trouble with him but he opens his mouth and receives a foreboding glare. 

“I just don’t understand why I’m not allowed to–”

“Hawkeye!”

“Talk.”

Blessedly, his dad arrives after a few more moments and raps his knuckles in the doorway.

“Thank God,” Van Der Haven mumbles like he thinks Hawkeye can’t hear. “Dr. Pierce! Please, come in.”

“Thank you, Mr. Van Der Haven,” he says, shaking his hand, and taking the seat next to Hawkeye, who waves.

“Hey, kiddo.”

“How was the drive, all right?” Van Der Haven asks.

“The drive? Well, it was February in Maine. It was very, very snowy. But I imagine you didn’t bring me in here to talk about road safety.”

Van Der Haven looks between the two Pierces with apprehension, like he’s just now getting the full picture of the Hawkeye problem.

He tells Dad it’s imperative that they talk about Hawkeye’s serious behavior issues, specifically attitude and sarcasm. Specifically that earlier that day he called Mrs. Parsons, the English teacher, stupid and condescending in front of the whole class. Hawkeye has a problem with respect for authority, apparently, this problem with respect to respect being that he has none. Dad asks casually if Mrs. Parsons is stupid and condescending or not. Van Der Haven’s eyes go wide but he ignores the question.

“This simply can’t go on any longer. Not with him behaving as he does, influencing the other students. And might I say I have a few questions about your attitude here this afternoon, Doctor.”

“My attitude? What attitude would that be?”

“See here, I’m the principal of this school, and you’ve been speaking to me as if I were–”

“Any other person?”

Van Der Haven gawps for a moment. “Well, yes.”

Dad sits back in his chair. “I’m afraid I don’t see the problem with that.”

“Right. Of course.”

“Now if you don’t mind,” he checks his watch, “school’s been over for nearly half an hour. I’d like to take my son home, now.”

“Yes. Of course. Doctor.”

“Hawkeye, that’s not what I asked. I asked you to tell me about the bus. The day at the beach.”

“Don’t you want to hear about my childhood?”

“It sounds more like you’re describing last Tuesday.”

Hawkeye laughs, short and bitter. “You’re not wrong. I have spent most of my illustrious military career being sent to the principal’s office.”

Amy is pissed with him. Amy is so pissed with him and he can’t stand it more than anything in the world when people are mad at him. It isn’t _technically_ his fault that they got in trouble since he doesn’t make the rules, but it is his fault that they snuck into the school library after theater rehearsals when it was supposed to be closed and got caught reading _Elmer Gantry_ and got put in detention when his excuse that they were just interested in Lewis’ works besides _Arrowsmith_ didn’t seem to pass muster.

“Amy.”

“Shut up, Hawkeye.”

His pushes his chair onto its back legs and sees her watching him in her periphery, making sure he doesn’t crash and get a concussion. He rights the chair and looks at her, and watches her look away at the last second so their eyes don’t meet.

“Amyyy.”

“Hawk! I don’t want to talk.”

“Amy.”

“You’re impossible! I told you I don’t want to talk. And it wouldn’t even matter if I did, because we’re not allowed to!”

“Allowed? Who’s not allowing us?” He makes a show of looking around. “There’s nobody in here. We can basically do whatever we want.”

“They told us not to.”

“Yeah, they said that, and then they left, so it’s basically moot.” He learned that word last week. “In fact, we’re probably supposed to talk. It’s like a social experiment, put us in a room together and see what happens, if we come out reformed.”

“We’re supposed to come out reformed after we sit in here for two hours and don’t talk.”

“Amyyyyy!”

“Shut up!”

He shuts up. For about a minute. He can hear the clock on the wall ticking, each second seemingly taking longer than the last, and it’s driving him crazy. The gray clouds outside mean it looks like rain and he just knows his bike is rusting while they rot in this empty classroom. And Amy is missing band practice and he has Latin homework he has to finish but he can’t think about anything besides the fact that she’s angry with him.

“I’m sorry,” he says suddenly. “I know I don’t care about getting in trouble, but I should know not everybody’s like that. I didn’t mean for us to get caught, and it was my fault, and I’m sorry that you got wrapped up in it. It won’t happen again.”

Finally she looks at him, really looks at him.

"You really mean that, don’t you?”

“What? Of course I do.” He wouldn’t dream of lying to her, not about this. It’s important to her.

“Hawkeye, you’re smart, but you’re dumb. And I forgive you.”

At home Dad tells him if he wants to read _Elmer Gantry_ he should just ask.

“You make it hard to have a rebellious phase when you support me in everything I do.”

“I don’t know, it seems like you rebel plenty. Just not against me.”

Of all the people to see him like this, of course it’s Margaret Houlihan. Of course it’s the person on this camp with the lowest possible opinion of him, the one whose camaraderie he only feels in passing moments of worst possible scenarios. Of course she sees him on the floor, slumped against the front of the bar with his head between his knees, shaking, all but praying to wake up from this nightmare. As if he should have expected anything else.

But she doesn’t chastise him. She looks more like he’s piqued her curiosity. She stands over him with her arms crossed but speaks gently.

“What’s wrong, Hawkeye?”

 _Hawkeye_. He must seem really fucked if she’s using his first name. He feels every muscle in his throat strain as he swallows.

“I’m tired,” he says. He thought he’d abandoned pretense a long time ago, but now each day he abandons it more and more. He leans his head back and it lands against the bar with a small thud. Margaret cringes. “I’m just tired.”

“Tired of what?” she says evenly.

“What a stupid question.”

“It’s not a stupid question,” she says, still looking down at him. The polish on her boots is wearing off. “If this is what ‘tired of everything’ looked like you’d look like this all the time.”

“Marg-a-ret,” he whines. He doesn’t mean for it to sound petulant; it’s just how he sounds when he begins to cry mid-word. “This is how I look all the time. This is how I feel all the time.”

“It’s not, though.”

She kicks his boot with hers like they’re kids at summer camp. She sits down next to him under the bar and copies his position, putting her knees up and wrapping her arms around them like she’s sheltering from an earthquake.

“I hate this place,” he says. “I hate everything about it.”

“Tough,” she says. “We need you.”

“Isn’t that just the cherry on top. What the hell do you need me for?”

“Who’s asking stupid questions now?”

“No, Margaret, I’m serious. Why the hell can they send Trapper home and not me? Why do they need you, or BJ, or Henry, or goddamn Klinger or any of us? I mean genuinely, what the hell are we doing here?”

“Hawkeye–”

“And if you say some inane bullshit like we’re fighting for democracy I swear to Sinclair Lewis I will stitch every rubber glove in this camp to your uniform and then burn it and then desert. Through the minefield.”

“Pierce–”

“No fooling, Margaret! Nothing could be worth this, and I can’t take it anymore feeling like the only person who sees that this little game of battleships we’re playing here has big repercussions.”

“Well, you have to put it out of your mind. You’re here to help people, not to hurt them. The rest of that stuff, I guess you have to try to forget about it, for a little while at least. Seeing as there’s nothing you can do about it.”

 _As everyone is so fucking keen to remind me_.

“Forget about it? How can I forget about it? Can’t you see how profoundly fucked up this is?”

“Come on,” she says. She raises her arm like she’s going to put it around him, but she hesitates. Hawkeye knows she doesn’t usually afford physical touch as a comfort unless she plans for sex to be involved, but at this point sleeping with Margaret Houlihan could literally not be lower down on his to-do list. He’s curious to see what she does next. Instead of hugging him, she sort of pets his hair. It’s much more maternal than flirtatious, and apparently he doesn’t contain his look of shock very well, since she pulls back abruptly.

“Sorry,” she says. “I don’t know.”

“It’s okay,” he says. “I don’t know either.”

He doesn’t understand why she’s being so kind. Margaret who hates him and everything he stands for with more vitriol than anyone he’s ever met. (Margaret who actually means it unlike Frank who has no idea what he’s talking about. Margaret who he knows for a fact thinks he’s the best surgeon at this hospital. Margaret who’s just about the only regular army officer whose company he can tolerate for more than thirty seconds at a time. Margaret who would have him dishonorably discharged in a second if she knew half the things he worried about.)

“You don’t have to go through it alone,” she says like she can read his mind. “You’re not the only one who feels like you’re carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders.”

Hawkeye rubs at his eyes. He feels about ten years old. He hardly knows how he got here, not really.

“You never hear Atlas complaining.”

“Hawkeye–”

“I don’t _want_ to do it alone,” he says, because this is the fundamental thing about him. He never wants to do anything alone. He just ends up that way.

“And I’m telling you you don’t have to. You have BJ, don’t you? And you two seem…” she can’t find the words because there probably are none. “And you have me. Really.” She pats his hand.

“Why are you being so nice to me?”

“Why are you being so nice to me?”

Tank O’Melinski’s girlfriend Michelle is propping him against the kitchen counter in the medical frat house on 113th street icing his eye.

“Because I’m mad that he cheated, the two faced rat!” she calls to the rest of the house. “Not that he cheated with you.”

“Uh-huh.”

She checks under her makeshift ice pack to see if the swelling is going down. Hawkeye cringes.

“You in nursing school?” he asks.

“Yup. Second year,” she answers tersely and returns the chilly compress.

“Me, too,” he says. “Medical school, I mean.”

“I wanted to go to medical school,” she tells him. She guides him to hold the ice pack himself and hops up onto the counter. She sips beer from a plastic cup. “How many girls are in your year?”

“Two.” Hawkeye knows the answer without thinking. He’d begged Anita Salvatore to be his lab partner when it became obvious they were the two smartest people in their section and Nicole Blanchard had introduced him to the concept of dry martinis at a club in the West Village before leaving him to go home with the bartender and that was it.

“Go figure,” Michelle says. “I would’ve been a great doctor.”

“You’re nursing’s not half bad either.”

“Fuck off, Pierce,” she says. “Home-wrecker.” She kisses him on the cheek and disappears into the rest of the party. _Hawkeye, you’re smart, but you’re dumb_. Nope. He does not understand women at all.

“I don’t hate you, Hawkeye, even if you’re dead set on thinking I do,” Margaret answers him.

“You’ve got a funny way of showing it.”

“Oh, don’t give me that. It’s not as if you treat me with peaches and cream either.”

Hawkeye starts laughing because that is definitely not a real expression. Eventually she joins in. He hardly knows who she is in that moment. A year ago he never would have believed she was someone who could laugh at herself.

“So what’s your sage advice, Ms. Peaches-and-Cream, Ms. Put-It-Out-Of-Your-Mind?”

“Well, seeing as you’re convinced that isn’t going to work for you, try something that will! Rant, rave, monologue, do something! I know that’s what you love to do. I’m here, I’m listening, just tell me what’s on your mind.”

“Well, you know,” he says, his ninety-five theses on the subject of Why The Army Can Suck My Dick perpetually at his fingertips. “Mostly struggling with the nature of my conscription into the American imperialist war machine, not that I wasn’t a tacit member of it to begin with, but if you haven’t noticed now I’m in the actual army, and that’s not even mentioning trying to square our nineteenth century foreign policy let alone invading Korea with the principles supposedly underlying the American revolution, though I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, all things considered, since maybe I would classify that as more of a bourgeois revolution in the first place more akin to the French than say the Haitian or God forbid the Russian, so what should you really expect.”

“Huh,” Margaret says, her eyebrows in her hairline. “I didn’t realize you were having such a philosophical problem.”

“Where have you been? What kind of problem did you think I was having?”

“I thought it had to do with Walton! Or McIntyre,” she adds, quieter. Hawkeye’s heart falls to his stomach then jumps to his throat.

“Yeah, well. So what if it does. So what if I’m tired of being left. Here.”

“Then that wouldn’t surprise me. And it wouldn’t make you weak, or any less–”

“You think that’s what I care about? Looking weak? Margaret, I’m so weak I’m tearing at the seams! I’m a coward, a fraidy-cat, a wimp! I’m chicken, gutless, lily-livered. I’m terrified to get up and I’m petrified to go to sleep. I can’t think about going to work in the morning without being sick to my stomach and nobody even tries to tell me it’s all in my head because it just plain isn’t. I’m scared, Margaret. Every single second of every single day, and I don’t care who knows it. In fact, I want everybody to know it because the more people know how goddamn scary this is the sooner they’ll let me–” the words catch in his throat when he realizes how childish he’s about to sound. “Let me go home.”

Margaret’s gaze has gone steely again and she looks like she wants to tell him to man-up.

“And on top of that,” he’s talking with his hands now, unable to control the wild and jerky movements, “the only woman I’ve ever loved, who actually loved me back by the way just for novelty, has decided after being with me for three whole weeks that I’m destined to be a bachelor forever, which is just fucking peachy. And on top of _that_ , my best friend got sent home while I was away and I was too busy enjoying the idea of being unreachable to answer the goddamn phone and say goodbye, and now he’s gone and I’ll never be–” He puts his head in his hands and ruffles his hair violently. 

“I loved her, and I hated her, and I loved him, and I hated him, and I–” he stops himself before he says anything stupid about BJ, anything more stupid than he’s already said.

“I’ll stay with you, Hawkeye,” Margaret says, which just figures, since he loves her and hates her as well. “But you make it difficult, you know.”

“What?”

“Well,” she looks as if she’s containing a giggle. “You’re such a drama queen!”

“What?” When he looks up at her, she’s laughing, beaming with all her perfect teeth. She’s… making fun of him? But it doesn’t feel mean at all. She’s speaking to him like they’re friends, and she’s diffused the situation almost better than BJ would’ve. That is one hell of a development.

Dad takes him to the diner on the way home from the principal’s office and buys him a hot chocolate and a grilled cheese with tomatoes.

“You can’t just go around calling teachers stupid and condescending, Hawk,” he says casually while he sips a decaf coffee. Hawkeye looks up from his sandwich.

“Then how come you argued with Principal Van Der Haven?”

Dad teaches him about the concept of propriety, and that most people who are in charge think they’re in charge for a reason, and that you should treat them like that regardless of if you agree or not. That’s why Van Der Haven thinks he shouldn’t talk back to his teachers. Dad says he shouldn’t do it because it will get him in trouble.

“Listen,” Dad says, running a finger along the rim of his coffee cup, “it’s okay to give authority figures a hard time on principle, and I think you’re right to want to know why you have to follow the rules that you do.”

“Okay.”

“But you can’t let that go to your head, you see? Just like they’re not the arbiters of good and evil, neither are you.”

“What does that mean, arbiters?”

“People who decide.”

“Oh. So who does decide what’s good and evil?”

Dad strokes his chin and thinks for a minute. “I suppose everybody has to decide for themselves. You have to give people a chance to earn your respect, but if they don’t, then you can talk to them how you think is right.”

That year Sandy Falcon starts proverbially pulling on his pigtails. She rubs her inky fingers in his hair and copies off his homework and always tries to sit next to him on the school bus by pushing in front of Toby Wilder at their stop. He thinks she is the most annoying person on the planet.

“Hawk and Falcon, that’s pretty funny,” Dad tells him at the kitchen table after he’s been complaining about her for so long that his dinner’s gone cold.

“It’s not funny, it’s obnoxious!”

“It sounds like she likes you.”

“If she likes me, why does she only ever try to bother me?”

Dad shrugs. “That’s just how it is with girls sometimes. And boys, I guess.”

Hawkeye taps his fork against his plate. “Did you used to bother Mom?”

Dad looks at him over his water. “Yes and no. You know she was pretty bothered the first time I met her anyway, what with her car breaking down outside the office.”

Hawkeye looks up at him because he knows that didn’t answer his question. Dad smiles and sighs.

“We did used to fight, I suppose, and annoy each other on purpose. She would– she never in fifteen years ever thought I washed a dish correctly, you know? Apparently I always left streaks and this drove her absolutely crazy.” Even though he’s describing an argument, he’s smiling wistfully like he would give anything to be having it again right now. “So whenever we went for dinner at a friend’s house she would take me to the kitchen after dinner and show me how perfectly the husband had washed all the dishes and why, oh why, Daniel can you not learn how to do it properly!”

“The dishes never look streaky to me.”

“They didn’t to me either. It was just a joke we had. Because– I suppose you always make fun of the person you love for some things. Not things that would actually hurt their feelings, but things that they do that they know are silly. Like how you laugh when I try to sing along to the radio, or how I tease you for your floppy hair always going in your eyes.”

Dad reaches over to comb Hawkeye’s hair forward and they both laugh uproariously as it lands in his forkful of spaghetti.

“Okay, I see what you mean,” Hawkeye says, taking a napkin to his forehead.

“Isn’t there anybody you like?” Dad asks.

Hawkeye thinks about the time he hid Tommy’s pencil box and wouldn’t tell him where it was until he threatened to scream. And all the times he pushed past someone just so he’d be next to him in the lunch line. And all the times he’d stolen food off his tray, just because he could, just to see his reaction.

“I don’t think so,” Hawkeye says. “All of the girls at school are really annoying.”

“I can’t believe it, that guy didn’t laugh at a single thing I said,” Hawkeye says, befuddled, after the Other Captain Pierce takes his leave. He heads out of the Swamp, too, in the other direction, so they can argue without Charles. BJ follows him obligingly.

“Relax, Hawk, not everybody’s gonna think you’re Milton Berle,” BJ says in a way that makes it clear just how silly he thinks Hawkeye’s complaining is.

“Yeah, sure, but he didn’t even crack a smile! It’s not like I’ve got some kind of quirky, obscure sense of humor. I don’t have ‘a sense of humor,’ I have _the_ sense of humor, you know, the kind that makes you funny.”

“Damn, I didn’t realize I was in the presence of comedy royalty.”

“No, come on, come on, that’s not what I mean. I’m not being an ego maniac or anything, I’m just making scientific observations, and the overwhelming data suggest that I know what’s funny and what’s not, and that schmuck doesn’t.”

“Okay, fine, so you’re objectively funny,” BJ says, because he hates confrontation almost as much as Hawkeye loves it. Seriously, he should work for the bomb squad he’s so good at diffusing things.

“You’re just saying that,” Hawkeye says, because he is very much the guy who lights a match near a gas leak.

“What the hell do you want me to say?”

 _If you think I’m so funny why don’t you prove it?_

“I don’t know, I don’t just want you to say something because it’s the right thing to say, I want you to say something because you mean it.” _Also, pin me against the wall of the supply tent and laugh while I tell jokes into your neck._

 _“_ How do you know what I mean and don’t mean?” 

“I don’t know,” he says. “Whose fault is it if I can’t?” Because it’s true that BJ is one cagey motherfucker.

“God, Hawk. You’re impossible.”

“You’re impossible, Hawkeye,” Nick tells him. Nick the perfect, beautiful, tall engineering student with the hundred watt smile who sidled up to Hawkeye in the cafe outside the science building as casual as anything and asked if he could buy him a drink eight months ago, almost to the day, which Hawkeye definitely isn’t keeping track of.

“Right. Except for the fact that I’m sitting right here, I’m impossible.”

“Don’t be obtuse. You know what I mean.”

“Ah ha, right, but you wouldn’t be so cruel as to say it, so you just have to make me think it.” Hawkeye knows he’s being unnecessarily mean, but he also doesn’t care. He almost likes it, which scares him a little. “How goddamn chivalrous, thank you. Poor Hawkeye, impossible to love, well, I think I’ll just–”

“Don’t give me that.”

“What.”

“That self-deprecating bullshit when you know full well you are the most egotistical person I’ve ever met.”

“Egotistical–?”

“You think you can save the whole goddamn world all by yourself! That if you don’t go full tilt twenty-four-fucking-seven everything is going to collapse. Well, I’ve got news for you, Hawkeye Pierce: the world is collapsing anyway and there isn’t a thing you can do about it.”

“Fuck off. You think I’m that naive?” Hawkeye says, even though it fucking hurts to hear him say that. It’s a halfhearted attempt to create some kind of illusion that he isn’t the one being dumped here.

“I don’t know what I think.” Nick stands up and goes to the door. “I think if you don’t wise up to the way things really work soon then yeah, you are impossible.”

“How goes it, Hawk? Long day at the salt mines?”

Dad closes up shop early on Mondays and is usually home by the time Hawkeye gets back from school.

“I’m impossible, apparently. I heard Mrs. Lynch telling Van Der Haven about the _Hamlet_ thing when I went past the office.” The _Hamlet_ thing being him and Tommy Gillis storming into English class one morning with a stolen skull and reciting selections from various soliloquies while standing precariously upon desks and insisting it was a new technique suggested by the theater teacher.

“You’re not impossible,” Dad tells him from the kitchen table. “Just very silly. It’s their loss if they can’t handle it.”

“Uh-huh. Thanks, Dad. I just don’t know why Lynch has to be such a bitch about it.”

Dad looks at him over his newspaper. “Don’t say ‘bitch,’ Hawkeye, it’s uncouth. Try ‘motherfucker.’ It’s very hip and all-inclusive.”

“I don’t know. I don’t really think my English teacher is a motherfucker– hang on, I’m writing a joke about Oedipus, can I get back to you when it’s ready?”

“If you haven’t slain me on the road to Thebes by then.”

“Uh-huh, very funny.” Hawkeye rummages around in the kitchen cupboards till he finds the Ritz crackers and starts eating them out of the box.

“Did it really bother you? Hearing her say that?”

“I don’t know,” Hawkeye says, joining him at the table. “I guess I more thought it was weird that she would say something like that right there, with the office door open and everything, where anyone could hear them. Where I could hear them. It’s like, if you’re going to say mean things about me behind my back could you at least do it in a place where I might not accidentally overhear? I wasn’t even eavesdropping, by the way, I was just walking by.”

“I’d call it moderately unprofessional. I’d say it’s her prerogative to tell the principal about all the… shenanigans you get up to in her classroom. But no, it’s not a very nice thing to say.”

“It’s not like I’m trying to be impossible, I’m just trying to have a little fun! Teachers take school way too seriously. Everybody takes everything way too seriously.”

“Can I ask you something, Hawkeye?”

He thinks about telling Mulcahy that they’re doing it in reverse again, but he knows he’s just about the only person on this camp that the chaplain will go to if he’s having a problem. It’s weird, and borderline unethical, but that’s never stopped Hawkeye before.

“Sure, Father, what’s up?”

“Well, you’ve come to me many times, for counsel, advice, or just a friendly chat.”

“Sure.”

“But I can’t recall a single time you’ve come to make a confession. I wonder if that wouldn’t help you somewhat.”

“I mean, I’m not Catholic, Father. Far from it.” He probably needs a shrink more than a priest, but Sidney’s said before that Mulcahy makes a serviceable substitute. He figures it’s better to talk to somebody than to keep everything bottled up.

“Neither was Captain Casey, Schwartz, rather, and he still asked if he could view this tent as a confessional.”

“What, you mean you want me to come in here every time I lie to a patient that they’re gonna be fine, or steal Charles’ fancy booze, or jerk off in the shower?”

“Hawkeye!”

Hawkeye sighs and rolls his eyes in resignation. “I’m sorry, Father. I guess… I know that’s not what you mean. You’re too smart for that. I don’t know, I mean, it’s not like I don’t feel guilty for the mistakes I make. Guilt is basically my middle name. Actually it’s ‘Franklin’ but that’s barely better. I guess I don’t think of anything I do as sinning, per se. I don’t want absolution for my mistakes, to not have to take responsibility for them; I want the advice of a friend to help me fix them.” Besides, as much as he likes the Father he’s not sure they’ll see eye to eye on everything that requires a confession.

“Why, that’s not what absolution means, my son! It’s only a first step, a way to stop the guilt from eating you alive while you right your wrong.”

“I don’t know, Father. No offense, but I don’t need forgiveness from a priest to feel better. I just need to do better. That’s how I’ll help. Maybe it’s selfish. Maybe I am as egotistical as everybody says, but it’s my own standards I’m trying to live up to. Not yours, not your God’s, not anybody’s besides mine. And maybe my dad’s.” Hawkeye speaks his last thought with the rhythm of a joke, he’s sure Mulcahy thinks he’s being serious.

“I don’t think you see it, Hawkeye, but you give the people around here a lot of hope.”

“How’s that? You’re right, Father, I don’t see it.”

“Oh, Hawkeye,” he says, his voice warm and impassioned. “Whenever you tear some general a new one, do you really think it’s all for nothing like so many people tell you it is? Of course you don’t! The people here know that. Why, if someone as smart as you are believes he can change things, it just might make other people believe things will change eventually, too.” Mulcahy claps him on the shoulder a little stiffly, but it shows he cares. “That’s a very important thing you bring to this camp. Hope. And it’s the kind of influence that lasts a lifetime. Oh, we could never forget you, Hawkeye, you’re very special.” 

“Father–” Hawkeye sighs. “That’s awfully kind of you, really. But I’m just doing what anybody would do. What everybody’s doing, you know, whatever I can to get by.”

“Then you must be a very hopeful person,” Mulcahy tells him. “May I make some observations? Something tells me they may be hard for you to hear.”

Hawkeye cocks an eyebrow. “Go for it, Father. Hard truths are the most important.”

Mulcahy smiles, and places a hand on Hawkeye’s knee. It manages to be paternal, even though Mulcahy must be barely Hawkeye’s age.

“I think you really believe things will change one day. Hawkeye, you care more about the preservation of life than some ostensibly religious men I know. You care more deeply about peace and justice than nearly anyone I’ve ever met, all the while believing you’re wholly apathetic and cynical.”

“Stop it, Father, Jesus.”

“Truly, Hawkeye? I think you might be the most hopeful person I know, since you must only be fighting for those things because you can envision a world where they’re possible. That’s more than most men, most good men even, can say. You’re a person I can look up to.” 

Which is crazy! Because the Father wouldn’t bullshit him, so he must believe what he’s saying.

“I don’t know where you got your wires crossed, but it was somewhere. I’m– I’m not– I’m a moral degenerate, you know, and I don’t just mean because of a little light sodomy on the weekends, I mean the real stuff, guilt that only Catholics and Jews seem capable of experiencing, so I’ve got a double dose.”

“Hawkeye–”

“Seriously, Father, you’ve got to get me down off that pedestal because I don’t think it ends well for either of us.”

There comes a time after a year, maybe two, where he doesn’t really mind Margaret’s company anymore. He never really minded it in the first place; he didn’t hate her, just everything she stood for. Stands for. And so it smarts slightly when she still loudly protests at being sent anywhere with him, even if it’s not the front but just a small surgical conference in Taegu. He can’t think who she’d prefer to be stuck with, since there’s no way Charles is less annoying than he is and there’s at least a chance of sex if it’s him and not BJ. Not that he intends to push things with her, and he is none too pleased either when they have to share a room thanks to a booking error or a thinly veiled attempt at matchmaking by Radar. 

Once they get upstairs he immediately crashes onto the bed and starts loosening his tie. Class A’s really are murder. Maybe he should invest in some orthopedic inserts or something. Dad probably knows a guy back home. So he’s completely unaware that Margaret is standing over the bed, glaring at him, waiting for him to move or leave or otherwise accommodate her.

“Pierce!” she calls sharply.

“Huh? What?”

“Well?” she indicates him sprawled out thoughtlessly across the whole bed. “You are almost comically self-absorbed.”

“Almost?” he says, collecting up his jacket and scooting to one side.

“You really expect me to share with you? You– you–”

“Relax, Margaret, it’s just us girls. It’ll be a slumber party.”

“You are a moral defective.”

“On purpose and everything. I'm gonna take a shower. When I get out we can paint each others’ nails and gossip about boys.” He smiles at her, halfway between convincing and not, and moves to scrub the latest layer of Korea off of him.

He knows he hasn’t done a ton to make Margaret trust him, but he also doesn’t know why she hates him so much. Or rather, he knows why she hates him now, but he doesn’t know why she hated him from the start. The are are times (mostly in the O.R.) when he thinks she just about respects him, but then she remembers he prefers peace to war and will stop at basically nothing to get it, and decides that makes him the craziest person she’s ever met. But besides that small idiosyncrasy it just seems like she’s the kind of person he could be friends with if she hadn’t spent her whole life being convinced that people like him were harbingers of the apocalypse or something.

He misses having friends that he could just talk to about stuff without feeling like every conversation might make or break his entire future if he accidentally says the wrong thing. This is true about Margaret and BJ for different reasons, of course, but he’s just not used to living a high stakes life like this, outside the operating room. He was never meant to be in a life or death situation. Class clowns simply don’t save lives, no matter how important people seem to think morale is.

He dries off and examines himself in the mirror. He considers shaving but realizes he forgot his razor, so he puts on clean underwear and a t-shirt and emerges to find Margaret reading a magazine in the armchair by the radiator. She’s too proper to sit on the bed even when he’s not there. 

“That’s how you’re going to sleep?” she says, absolutely scandalized.

“Margaret!” he laughs.

“No. Absolutely not. I mean, how dare you even try to–”

“What do you want me to do? I don’t own pajamas.” He starts rummaging through his bag for his book.

“You think you can just come in here, strutting around like some kind of harlot–”

“You do realize we’ve literally slept together, right? I don’t think you can turn the jaws of propriety on me now, Mrs. Penobscott.”

“Oh, you bastard. I mean, you complete sniveling low-life, how dare you–”

“Oy vey iz mir, Margaret! What is the problem?”

“You think the world is made for you! That everything should just change to suit how you think it should be. How about you try changing for once?”

“No thanks,” he says, throwing himself casually back down on his side of the bed. “I like me the way I am.”

“You’re lucky BJ finds you charming.”

“Don’t I know it. Well?” he pats the bed next to him. She sighs and gingerly sets herself down. He purposefully sticks his nose in _Main Street_ and makes almost no movements, not wanting to do anything that could be perceived as making a pass at her, since he really does want to set her at ease in this moment. When minutes pass and he can still feel her tense beside him, he dog-ears his book and sets it down.

“All this because I sleep in my underwear?”

“All what? I’m fine.”

He scoffs. “God, you and BJ both.”

“What?”

“Pretending like you’re fine! Like none of this is bothering you. Well, I’ve got news for you, everybody is affected here and you’re not walking away from this unscathed, lady.”

“Well. Some of us didn’t turn up here already only playing with half a deck.” _Ouch_.

“Excuse you, I could at the very least execute a game of pinochle with what I got. Queen of Hearts, that’s me.”

“Sure.”

“Yeah.”

Hawkeye gets along with BJ better than anyone he ever has before. They seem to _get_ each other. They seem to have gotten each other from the off, and Hawkeye oscillates wildly between thinking that’s incredibly special and thinking that that’s precisely how he felt about Carlye and Trapper and look where that got him. BJ follows him to his post-op shift and lingers by the desk even though he has no reason to be there besides to keep Hawkeye company. He does his rounds, watching BJ watch him in his periphery. He pauses to chat to a Private Harmon with a broken leg and a copy of _Doctor Faustus._

“Kit Marlowe,” Hawkeye says, when he has to move the book to look at some lacerations on his chest. “You know I heard rumors about him and Shakespeare,” he says with a suggestive wiggle of his eyebrows.

“Oh, yeah? What kind of rumors?”

“Unspeakable,” Hawkeye says, and buttons Harmon’s shirt back up. On the other side of the room, Corporal Mayer is just coming to.

“How ya feeling, kid?” Hawkeye asks as he reviews his chart. Mayer raises his hand to make a _so-so_ gesture. “Can you talk?”

“Sure,” he mumbles. “Just tired.”

“Tired? You? You’ve been asleep for days!” Hawkeye says, taking a seat at the side of his bed. He checks his vitals and everything’s normal, standard post-operative fatigue. “If you need anything, my name’s Hawkeye. Just holler for me, or get a nurse to do it. They’ll need the practice, screaming my name.”

“Hawkeye,” Mayer says, “what kind of name is that?”

“It’s Portuguese.”

Mayer looks confused, but too wiped to argue, and fades back out of consciousness. Father Mulcahy must have been around distributing library stock, since a tattered _Othello_ is lying on his bedside table. Hawkeye brings it over with him to BJ at the desk. If all else fails they can do a dramatic reading. That classic comedic duo, Iago and Roderigo. Hawkeye almost makes himself laugh out loud at the thought. BJ glances at the cover and looks away in contemplation.

“I don’t think I would have blamed her,” BJ says.

“What?”

“For getting with Cassio.”

 _Oy vey_. “She doesn’t get with Cassio.”

“Sure, but he thinks she does.”

“I’m literally begging you on my hands and knees not to compare yourself to Othello.”

“You mean you don’t feel like your love life is the stuff of Shakespearean tragedy?”

Hawkeye searches BJ’s expression. “Not quite,” he says. “It’s Greek drama for me, I think. It’s Herculean efforts I make every day. Like forcing myself to swallow the dreck they call coffee.” _Like not falling in love with you, like not falling in love with you_. Hercules would never have gotten anything done if he’d had BJ Hunnicutt beside him all the time.

BJ doesn’t laugh at his joke. He’s still thinking about his Desdemona.

“It’s just– with him being away so long, I couldn’t possibly blame her for getting with Cassio.”

“She doesn’t. Get. With Cassio.”

It’s incredible that he thinks Peg might leave him. Incredible in the original sense of the word, that is, un-fucking-believable.

“But I can see why he’d think she does! But if it was me, I wouldn’t even get angry. I wouldn’t blame her at all. Her, or Cordelia, or Ophelia, or any of them. Penelope, Circe, Briseis.”

“Lady Macbeth?”

“A tragic heroine.”

“Jesus Christ,” Hawkeye bemoans.

“The perennial underdog.”

“You know the first recorded use of the word ‘lonely’ is in _Coriolanus_?”

“That Shakespeare guy really knows how to hit you where it hurts.”

“It’s actually a common misconception that Shakespeare invented all the words he’s credited with. Eyeball, gadzooks, ‘aye, there’s the rub.’ Most likely they were in common usage at the time, and he was just the first person to write them down. No one will ever know the first person who called themselves lonely.”

“I guess that makes sense.” BJ takes the play from him and fans through the pages. “How do you know all that?”

“I did theater in high school.” He stands, places his hands triumphantly on his hips and projects his voice theatrically. “I’ll have you know you’re speaking with Duncan, Thane of Fife.”

“Somehow that doesn’t surprise me.” 

BJ is so in synch with him it’s almost beautiful, yet somehow it still makes him feels spectacularly, Shakespeareanly _lonely._ Double, double, toil and trouble indeed.

Sometimes, on slow days like this, he feels kind of like a doctor in a hospital. He sighs, and surveys the post-op with BJ on his right hand, and remembers why he wanted to do this in the first place. Because he loves people; he loves when they’re stupid and silly, when they’re loud and obnoxious, and he loves helping them when they’re sick or sad whether it’s with medicine or laughter. He doesn’t quite know why, but he has a remarkable amount of faith in humanity. Love is a powerful thing, the only thing that’s kept him alive this long.

“When the war is over,” he says, “let’s go into practice together. We can split the difference and set up shop in Chicago. They run direct flights so we can commute.”

BJ hums. “No fair. That’s a two hour time difference for me and only one for you.”

Hawkeye strokes his chin. “How about this- there’s a Hopi reservation in Arizona that doesn’t do daylight savings time, so we’ll be even by the end of each year.” There’s a _Benjamin Franklin_ joke to be made somewhere but Hawkeye is too distracted at envisioning their clinic to write it.

“Okay, deal,” BJ says. And when BJ smiles at him it’s like the whole crooked world is righted on its axis. It’s such a beautiful thing when BJ plays along, and he doesn’t have to force it, either. He’s always one step ahead of Hawkeye, which is just how he likes it.

One day BJ is bemoaning their fate as they pack a jeep to go up to the front.

“They’re sending us into battle, Achilles and Patroclus,” BJ says, donning his helmet and getting into the driver’s seat.

“Do you know what you’re saying?” Hawkeye says as he joins him. _I know we’re tragic lovers_ , he thinks, _but I didn’t think you did._

“You don’t think I would mourn you like that?” BJ starts the ignition and waves off the corpsmen who’d helped them get set up. “If you get killed I’ll be inconsolable.” He sounds almost cheerful.

“At least this way we’ll go down together.”

“Probably better that way,” BJ agrees. “Peggy and your dad can start a support group.”

“My Son And/or Husband Met His Untimely Death Trying to Stitch Up Lost Causes in Korean Police Action Anonymous.”

“Precisely.”

BJ takes a deep breath as they take the open road like he’s imagining it’s just a highway back home, like when they finish their journey they’ll be rolling up in the idyllic Mill Valley with a trunk full of goodies and sweets for Erin and not bandages and antibiotics. Hawkeye’s not sure what that makes him in this scenario, but he’s happy if it makes BJ happy.

“Love when you get a clear stretch like this and just coast up the, uh, up the old 405,” Hawkeye says.

BJ laughs. “First of all, there is never a ‘clear stretch’ on the 405, it’s bumper to bumper the whole way or nothing. Second, it’s in L.A. Famously.”

“L.A.-schmel-A,” Hawkeye says. “It’s all California to me.” He puts his right foot up and uses his knee as an armrest.

“Guess I’ll just have to show you around sometime,” BJ says.

“Guess you will,” Hawkeye says, even though he knows it’ll never happen. If he knows BJ Hunnicutt, and he does, then he will be working as hard as possible to scrub this whole god-awful situation from his brain the minute he sets foot back in the states, and Hawkeye will fade into his memories and dreams if he’s unlucky, as it should be.

“Have you really never been to California, the west coast, anything?”

Hawkeye drums his fingers on the back of BJ’s seat. “I was in L.A. once. Couldn’t take the heat.”

“What were you doing out there?” BJ asks. “I can’t believe I missed you.”

Hawkeye can only bear to glance at him when he says that, so he refocuses on the road and on answering his question instead.

“I had a friend in high school who moved out there after we graduated. We took this long road trip, Gemma and me, and Amy and Tommy, and spent a few days helping her get settled in. It was this hilarious, tiny apartment with about half a dozen starving actors all in some kind of nebulous, sexy relationship with each other and here was this eighteen year old kid from small town Maine, but they totally took her under their wing. They made sure no one took advantage of her, helped her get auditions, covered her rent when she was behind. They cooked together, ran lines together, went to all of each others’ shows. And she made it, too, like she’s an actress now with bit parts in movies and I think she even got a spot in _I Love Lucy,_ assuming she makes the edit.”

“Pshhh,” BJ makes an impressed sound through his teeth. 

“On the way back we got so exhausted we stopped for a week in Chicago, my dad and Tommy’s wiring us money to pay for the motel room. That’s when we discovered Adam’s–I don’t know. It’s a long time ago.” He refrains from telling the Adam’s Ribs story. No need to hamper the moment for BJ with memories of Trapper or worry him with the fact of how off the rails Hawkeye’s always been.

“So that would’ve been the summer of…?”

“’37,” Hawkeye says. “I turned eighteen the day we saw the Hoover Dam.”

“I would’ve been… fourteen,” BJ does the calculation. “Would you believe I was staying with my grandparents in San Bernardino that summer? We were an hour apart and we didn’t even know it.”

“Is that some kind of joke? That’s crazy, BJ.” Hawkeye looks over to see BJ grinning and shrugging.

“Okay, it’s crazy. Besides, my grandparents lived in Denver.”

“ _Denver?_ ” Hawkeye mouths incredulously to himself. That is just like BJ. And now he’ll never know whether in another timeline they would have met as kids.

He sits back and thinks about what BJ said as they were leaving. If they’re Achilles and Patroclus what does that make Peg, Briseis? And BJ’s mentioned her before, hasn’t he? Hawkeye’s not as up on his _Iliad_ as he used to be, _lo yisa goy el goy cherev_ , and all that, but he remembers his _Odyssey_ clear as anything. BJ says he wouldn’t blame Penelope, if he didn’t get back in time to fend off her lovers, if she left him for someone else. He wonders if he’d blame Odysseus if he fell off the wagon. (The answer is very much yes, yes he would).

Swords into plowshares, oars for spades. War is a dirty rotten business, and Hawkeye’s no epic hero. Fuck anybody who tries to make him into one. Unfortunately, sometimes that includes BJ.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So: “It’s Portuguese” is from the 1973 movie “Slither” with James Caan and Sally Kellerman (that’s Margaret in the mash movie to you and me) and is inexplicably a line me and my family reference all the time. The chapter titles come from the Phil ochs song “when I’m gone” which is a must-listen in general and has some serious hawk vibes


	2. there's no place in this world where i'll belong

Hawkeye is sitting on a bed with his feet up on a chair, so Sidney is sitting opposite him on the other bed with his feet up on a chair.

“You think BJ sees you as a hero here?”

Hawkeye’s fingers twitch like he’s trying to grab a pen, or a scalpel, or a suture, but they only reach air and scratchy army blanket.

“His own personal Martin Arrowsmith.”

“So what does he think now that you’re here?”

“He knows– he must know– there’s no reason for me to be in here, you know. I don’t know if you can see because you’re not hardly a real doctor, but there’s nothing wrong with me. I’m not letting him down. Don’t worry about that, I haven’t let him down.” God, he knows he sounds paranoid. He wants more than anything to sound sane, but Sidney brings it out in him.

“Are you feeling a lot of pressure?”

“Pressure? What kind of question is that? Every day I hold the lives of fifty guys in my stupid bony hands, and you ask me if I feel pressure? Sidney, they’re compressing me into a diamond.”

Sidney nods. “But from BJ?”

All of Hawkeye’s near constant motion stops. “No. Not from BJ, never from BJ.”

“Even though he sees you as a hero. The dependable one, the guy who can save everything.”

“No, that’s how he thinks I see myself. But neither of us is that stupid.”

“Uh-huh.” Sidney leans back. “Why don’t you tell me about the day at the beach?” 

Hawkeye believes in love at first sight, he really does. He is a goddamn hopeless romantic, and he can’t live like this. (He thinks he has a problem where he loves people who love, and people who love are usually married by the time they’re his age. BJ certainly is.) He spends half his time half in love with everyone he meets, and Dad will remind him that he always, always thinks it’s special, that he’s finally found the one this time. He doesn’t know how to explain it when this time he thinks he really has, and it’s the worst thing to ever happen to either of them.

BJ fascinates him. He’s cheerful and chipper but he’s not stupid. In fact, he’s just as bitter and angry as Hawkeye is about being there, but he never takes it out on anybody. It never even seems to come close to bubbling to the surface. Hawkeye doesn’t know how he does it, but it’s a skill that plenty of people think he could stand to learn. He loves to laugh and makes people laugh, and he tells horrible puns that infuriate Hawkeye passionately. He’s beautiful, kind, smart, with great hands (surgically and otherwise), and to top it all off, Dad would definitely love him. He might actually be perfect.

When BJ nearly catches Hawkeye talking to himself one night in the Swamp, he decides he needs to talk to someone. Hurriedly and harried he tells BJ he needs a cup of coffee and not to wait up for him, and he knocks on the door to Father Mulcahy’s tent.

“Oh, hello, Hawkeye,” the Father answers, pleasantly surprised. He looks cozy, clutching a mug of cocoa with a flannel blanket draped around him. It had been so temperate the last few weeks but the weather was starting to turn.

“I didn’t wake you, did I?”

“Heavens, no! I was just catching up with a little of the Good Book.”

“Good. You can’t go wrong with _Wuthering Heights_.”

Mulcahy laughs. “Come in, Hawkeye. What’s troubling you?”

“Well, I, uh…” Mulcahy takes a seat at his desk and indicates a chair for Hawkeye, but he waves his hand and starts to pace instead. Mulcahy peers up at him and watches his movements like a tennis match. “I’ve got this friend back home, you see–”

“Oh, yes.”

“Yeah,” Hawkeye says, having decided which route to take. “And she needs some advice, but she’s too embarrassed to ask anybody she knows, and I told her we have a very reliable chaplain. So, uh, Father, do you mind if I run her problem by you?”

“By all means, Hawkeye,” he says, and sits back in his chair to enjoy the show.

“You know, it’s to do with relationships but it’s not– it’s about human connection, you know, and friendship, not just about sex, so I’m sure you’ll still be able to–”

“Go ahead, Hawkeye. I’m listening.”

“Right,” he says. “Here’s the story. Basically, she was sort of, you know, seeing this guy. But it was very casual, they didn’t put any labels on it or anything. She thinks, uh… she knows now that it meant a lot more to her than it ever did to him. Basically he was married–”

“Oh, dear.”

“Which she knew, but was able to overlook because basically his wife was… away. Uh, taking care of her ailing mother, in Colorado. The high altitude, you know, it strains your lungs, uh. I know because I’m a doctor. And so when this guy was with her it was like he was really with her, but he had trouble, you know, actualizing the relationship because he maybe didn’t want to confront the fact that he wanted to, that he was, actually, cheating on his wife. Especially with a– with, uh, with her.”

“I see.”

“Yeah. So, uh, so one day she goes home and she rings him up, and his buddy answers, and lets her know that this guy has actually up and left, that he’s gone to Colorado to be with his wife, and despite everything they’d meant to each other over the past however long, he left without a note or a goodbye or anything, uh, and she felt– well, she didn’t know how to feel about it. Because he was never particularly hers to lose or be left by or anything.”

“I can see how that would still hurt very much.”

“Yeah, uh, yes, me, too.”

“Is that all?”  
“No! No, not, uh, not by a long shot. The real problem is the next guy.”

“Oh, my.”

“The real problem is the next day she goes into work all broken up, and there’s this new guy there, who she’s got to show around. All she can think about his how the old guy left her, but when she’s talking with this new guy it’s like the old guy never even existed. I mean, they have chemistry like nothing she’s ever experienced before, but the problem is she can’t tell how much of it is real, you know, if she’s just desperate for something off the rebound or if it could be, you know, the real thing. Because it’s early enough that it could go either way, you know, she could lean into the feeling and become totally infatuated with him, her whole life could revolve around being with him, talking and laughing and working together. Or she could cut it off at the pass. Convince herself that they could be friends, sure, but it’s not more than that. She could stop it from spiraling, probably, if that was the right thing to do.”

Hawkeye stops pacing right in the center of the tent.

“Why would that be the right thing to do?” Mulcahy prompts. “Even if maybe it didn’t become serious, what’s the harm in your friend, I don’t know, putting herself out there? As they say.”

“Because– I think she’s afraid to get hurt again. She couldn’t bear to see this be a repeat of last time. She just couldn’t take it.”

Hawkeye has surprised himself at how easy it was to create this character of the would-be home-wrecker.

“Why would it be a repeat of last time? Relationships start and end all the time, and if she thinks she’s found love I think that’s a beautiful thing, don’t you, Hawkeye?” 

“Sure I do, Father, sure I do.”

“So what’s really troubling her? I don’t know if I can cure a fear of vulnerability from twelve thousand miles away, you know.”

“Ah. Well. It’s probably worth mentioning that the second guy… is also married.”

“Ah,” Mulcahy repeats. “I see.”

“So what should she do?”

Hawkeye finally takes a seat across from Mulcahy and stares into his eyes, trying to read his mind. He knows he has a certain sway over the priest that he should or shouldn’t try to leverage. For some reason Mulcahy values his approval, and he thinks given enough plausible deniability he might actually end up giving him some good romantic advice.

“People can’t control their feelings, Hawkeye,” Mulcahy says. “Either she loves him or she doesn’t.”

“That simple, huh?”

“It may very well be.”

“What do you do, Father, when you get a crush?”

Mulcahy smiles and looks down, almost blushing. “Don’t worry about me, my son. I’ll be just fine.”

He wishes Mulcahy wasn’t as good as deflecting as he is since he desperately wants to know what the Father does when he likes somebody. It might actually be the most relevant piece of information in the world, but he has no idea how he would explain why within the story he’s woven. Hawkeye takes a deep breath.

“What if it’s dangerous to love him?” He’s getting closer to the truth, drawn toward revealing it like it’s magnetic. “What if it’ll make everyone unhappy in the long run, even people she’s never met? Like his wife. His daughter.” 

Mulcahy’s eyes meet his for a meaningful split second and Hawkeye wonders how much the Lord will be hearing about this little chat.

“I’ll say this, Hawkeye. People can’t control their feelings, but they can control their actions. It will be hard, it might even be very painful to try and stop the love, and it might not even be possible. But it will be possible not to act on it, or to act on it in the ways she can, in the ways that friends show their love. You’re very good at showing love of all kinds, Hawkeye. I’m sure you can give her some tips.” Mulcahy all but winks as he finishes speaking. Hawkeye feels like he’s having a dream that he turned up to a practical exam in his underwear.

 _It will be hard, it might even be very painful to try and stop the love, and it might not even be possible_. So why bother? Why not just coast? It’s only him that’ll be hurt in the end, so what does it matter? _It might not even be possible._ See? He never had a choice to begin with. So he lets himself fall in love. He lets himself be in love. Nothing could make this whole thing worth it, and he hasn’t decided yet if being in love makes it better or worse.

Before they leave their tent, BJ straightens Hawkeye’s collar like they are a married couple. BJ plans the schedule they will use to walk their imaginary dog, Yo-Yo, like they are a married couple. BJ holds his hand all through the jeep ride home after they deliver that poor, beautiful baby to the monastery in the dead of night like they are a young unmarried couple forced to give up their child to save face. BJ nags him about the way he brushes his teeth and sniffs his food the way his mother used to nag his father about washing the dishes. Hawkeye lives for it; no, he lives _on_ it, as if each touch is a syringe full of glucose. Each smile is a gallon of gasoline, each joke or loud burst of laughter the turning of a windmill. BJ is his, in a way. In a way, he is certainly BJ’s. And so they sit at breakfast and flirt out loud for everyone to see, but since it’s Hawkeye or something, it must be a joke.

“Jesus, I’m exhausted,” BJ says. “I can’t remember the last time I had time to shower.”

Hawkeye makes a small caricature of a breathy moan. “Ravish me,” he says evenly. “I must have your body.”

BJ smiles. He’ll take it. Margaret looks at him like he’s disgusting. He’ll take that, too.

“Not until you finish your toast,” BJ throws back.

“I will if you cut my crusts off.”

BJ looks at him like he can’t decide whether to roll his eyes or laugh. Hawkeye shrugs and starts tearing his toast apart, and only eats the center. He chews with his mouth open just to aggravate Margaret. Potter joins them at their table, beaming and holding a letter from home.

“Mildred just wrote me, proud as a peach! Our grandson Cory got a part in his first ever school play, _Snow White and the Seven Dwarves_.”

“That’s wonderful, sir!” Margaret says.

“Thank you, Major, it certainly is. He was Dopey, since I’m sure you were all about to ask.”

“Yeah, but what character did he play?” Hawkeye deadpans. He tries not to make it obvious that he’s only looking for BJ’s reaction, which is the appropriately wide grin.

“You cut that out,” Potter tells him.

“Coffee, Hawk?” BJ says, pushing himself up using Hawkeye’s shoulder. He grabs both of their mugs before he can answer and plops two sugars in Hawkeye’s before setting it down in front of him, because obviously he knows how he takes his coffee. Honestly, it would be weirder if he didn’t. BJ clinks his mug to his before taking a sip.

“Now that you’re properly caffeinated,” Potter says, “I’ve actually got some news you’re not going to like.” Hawkeye braces himself. “They’ve upped the rotation points again, now it’s at fifty.”

“Ugh!” BJ groans. Hawkeye feels his eyes growing wide and bile rising in his throat. This is not happening. This is some kind of sick and twisted nightmare and he is about to wake up. _Wake up! Wake up!_ he screams internally. The overwhelming sense of deja vu, that he’s definitely been here before is almost as sickening as the thought itself, that he really is going to be here forever. He reaches over and grips BJ’s bicep for stability. BJ covers his hand with his own and really fucking provides.

“Did I hear you right, Colonel?” Hawkeye says as steadily as he can manage. “Fifty points? Is this some kind of joke?”

“Afraid not, son–”

“Fuck off,” Hawkeye is saying almost before Potter’s gotten the words out. He extricates himself indelicately from the mess tent bench, his leg getting caught on something under the table, but he storms out eventually. He sees BJ apologize for him in his periphery and follow him out. BJ catches up to him and places a hand on the small of his back, which stops Hawkeye moving immediately. He blinks up at BJ in the bright sunlight of the center of the compound and doesn’t know what the hell to say. That must be the second worst feeling in the world, then, right after finding out you’ve been condemned to purgatory for eternity (i.e. your rotation points have been raised to fifty. That’s some fucking catch).

“There’s no need to swear at the Colonel,” BJ says. “I guess,” he adds, after Hawkeye stares daggers into his innocent blue eyes.

“I wasn’t swearing at him, I was swearing around him. There’s a difference.”

BJ’s breathing is slow and even. Hawkeye tries to copy it. He thinks he sees BJ notice that, and consciously try to slow it even more. After a minute like that Hawkeye almost feels like a person again.

“You’re okay,” BJ says. “You’re gonna be okay.” His hand is still lingering limply on Hawkeye’s waist.

“When you talk like that I almost believe you.”

“You better believe me, buster. I’m all you’ve got.”

“Yeah,” Hawkeye says. He wants a hug. He feels like a child for thinking it but goddamnit he wants a hug. “Take me home?”

BJ pulls him into his side and starts walking them back toward the Swamp. “Didn’t your father tell you never to go home with strange men?”

“No, he was too busy telling strange men never to go home with me.”

Hawkeye is going to make this anniversary special for BJ or die trying. He needs to, because it all but physically pains him to see BJ be so upset at being away from his family, and if Hawkeye loves him (and he does) he will do whatever he can to make him happy. Even if it manages to be the most painful thing in the world because he is putting his all into bringing BJ closer to the one thing Hawkeye will never be able to have, and especially not with BJ.

Hawkeye is trying, really trying not to think of it as their anniversary, first or otherwise, but every second he spends listening to BJ describe his normal life back home, the way he’d be spending his anniversary if he were there brings Hawkeye closer to giving in and just envisioning himself in Peg’s place, which makes him so angry with himself he think he might keel over from the guilt. All in all, this plan is going in an interesting if albeit predictable direction. Hawkeye has a bizarre penchant for self-sabotage that he’s thinking he might have to address sometime soon.

He thinks he is going to explode if he keeps listening to BJ describe the weather in San Francisco, the fog rolling through in the afternoon and covering the Golden Gate, but instead he urges him to keep going, prompting him to say what he and Peg would do next, and next, and next. _Let me pour you a damn cup of coffee_ , he thinks. Home is where the hearth is, and Hawkeye keeps the stove lit in the Swamp just for him. Klinger rolls his eyes as Hawkeye desperately attempts to steer the conversation someplace useful.

“You’re right, I’ve been running that subject into the ground. What do you do in the afternoon?”

“Hawkeye!”

“C’mon! Humor me. I’m interested in you.” _No, seriously. I’m interested in you._

BJ sighs and looks both ways like he’s about to tell a secret. Klinger is off cleaning tables now, so it’s just the two of them at the bar.

“The things I would’ve done if I was there to raise her, I– taking her to the playground I used to go to, to the read alouds at the library. Sometimes if I close my eyes I can picture Peg and Erin so clear it’s almost like I’m back home.”

Hawkeye mentally drafts the letter he’s writing to Peg to explain all this. There’s something that makes him particularly crazy about the idea of Peg seeing his handwriting, hearing his voice on the recording, like she’s not really supposed to know about him. Like his existence should be so cursory to her that he shouldn’t be made solid. He pities her in that moment; Hawkeye Pierce is just words on a page to her, now, but he’s about to become painfully real.

“What would you do, if you had a daughter?” BJ asks him, and snaps him out of his mild fugue.

“I–” The words catch in his throat. He stops himself from saying _I wouldn’t_ , but doesn’t come up with anything fast enough to replace it.

“I think you’d be a good father,” BJ says. “Maybe you don’t think you are, but you’re kind. It’s not– you’re never ready for it when it happens, so I think all you can be is kind. And be there. So I like to think I’m one for two.”

“You’ll be there soon, Beej,” Hawkeye reassures him, almost grateful that his spinning out means he doesn’t have to address whether or not he’d be a good dad. (He would, it just terrifies him and he feels like he has a lot of family stuff to unpack. He’s actually perfectly well-aware that he has issues surrounding his mother, thank you very much.) “You’ll be there, soon. Now come on, tell me what you’re going to do when you get back.”

“I guess it’s the little things I’m looking forward to most. Just seeing Peg give her a bath, watching her blow the little bubbles off her hand.”

Jealousy-guilt-shame spiral aside, there’s something very special about hearing BJ talk like this. This is one of the first times Hawkeye is confident BJ is actually telling the truth. He might not have a past he can trust, and they might not have a future, but BJ sure has a now. It’s just in the wrong place.

“Every day is a gift, you know,” Hawkeye says. “That’s why they call it the present.”

“You would hit me with a newspaper if I said something like that.”

“I’m feeling generous today. Call me an old sap.”

“Okay, you’re an old sap.”

“Thank you. Now shut up and tell me what you do on your anniversary.”

Later Hawkeye stops Margaret on her way out of pre-op. “Hey, you wanna do me a favor?”

He explains the new plan for BJ and she seems genuinely impressed that he’s capable of being so considerate, which he decides not to dwell on, and says she’d be glad to play a part as his dance partner.

“Swell, Margaret. Thanks,” Hawkeye says. He’s being sincere, of course, but she spots something not well hidden somewhere behind his eyes.

“Pierce,” she says almost mournfully. “You always want what you can’t have. World peace and BJ Hunnicutt.” With that she leaves him standing alone in the compound feeling so completely exposed he doesn’t know what to do with himself.

When the day comes even after Hawkeye’s had three weeks to recover (and recover from what, exactly?) it hits all over again. He doesn’t just love someone who loves someone else; he loves him _because_ of it, because of the way BJ loves with his whole heart and his whole being is made of kindness and he’s being made to suffer here for no apparent reason and–

Oh, good. BJ is looking at him over Margaret’s shoulder. Suddenly Hawkeye feels like he’s just intruded on an intimate moment, or like the neighbors caught him getting changed with the shades open. He looks away. They keep dancing. They dance, and they dance, and oh, how they dance, and actually Hawkeye can’t remember any dance ever lasting this long before in the whole of human history.

 _What am I doing here?_ he thinks frantically, wishing he could grip his psyche by the shoulders and shake it till it cooperated. (He’s finally starting to understand what people like Colonel Potter wish they could do to him.) He’s standing there being jealous of a woman who BJ is pretending is a different woman, wishing that he was pretending _he_ was the woman– it’s too much, actually, like it’s almost too crazy even for him. Hawkeye goes to BJ’s side almost as soon as he and Margaret part.

“We really gotcha, huh?” he says, nudging BJ with his elbow. He has never been more compelled to touch him than in this moment.

“Yeah,” BJ says, hardly showing more than a hint of a smile. “You got me.”

“What do you want to do now? I could take you back home, we could–”

“Listen, Hawk, I– I think I just want to be alone. I gotta write Peggy and I think– is that okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, yes, no, yeah, yes, of course,” Hawkeye says quickly. “Of course,” he says, trying to sound less hysterical and giving BJ a squeeze on his forearm before he leaves. Margaret comes up behind him and puts a hand in between his shoulder blades before stepping around to face him.

“Let me buy you a cup of coffee,” she says softly. She walks him arm and arm to the mess tent, and it’s late, and they’re the only people in there. He sits on top of the table with his legs crossed while Margaret gets them two mugs.

“Sugar?”

“Yes, darling?”

She doesn’t even roll her eyes. She just looks fond, and a little sorry for him, and when the hell did that happen? She sits next to him with her feet on the bench and they clink cups and each take a sip.

“I mean, Jesus, that’s really bad,” he says flatly and sets his down.

“I asked if you wanted sugar.”

“Oh, that’s what you meant? How disappointing,” he sighs. 

“There’s no need to make yourself so miserable, Captain.”

“Would you not call me that? Call me ‘Pierce’ if you have to but please, anything but Captain.”

She makes a sympathetic sound with her back teeth. Then she reaches over and slowly combs through his hair, just one motion but it feels like it lasts about fifteen minutes. She does have great hands, I mean, he could tell you she was a nurse even if he’d never met her before. Her fingers trace down the side of his face, pulling him to look toward her.

“Oh,” he says. “We’re doing this again?”

She gives a small shrug. “If it’ll help.”

“You’re a very generous person.”

“I’m not,” she says as their faces grow closer. “I think you bring it out in me.”

He raises an eyebrow, her lips tantalizingly close to his. Margaret’s lips, BJ’s fingers, peace in our time. Everything he wants is tantalizingly close and a million miles away. Margaret smiles and he gets a chill down his spine. So he gives in and he kisses her, because it is fun, and if she wants this from him, too, then who is he to deny her?

“It was supposed to be me and him,” Hawkeye says into her mouth.

“I know.”

“So what are we doing here?”

“I don’t know.” He kisses her neck and she gasps. “We can’t do this every time you’re pining for BJ, we’d never have time for anything else.”

“Take that back,” he says. She doesn’t. She just bites him lightly on the earlobe and makes her way back to his mouth.

It sucks for Margaret, he thinks, to be a stand in for BJ and Peg all in one night. But she’s just like him, she can really take it on the chin. That’s the thought which makes him recoil sharply backwards, since he spends all his time trying to convince people that actually no, he can’t take it.

“Sorry, I can’t do this,” he says.

“What’s wrong?”

“I– you deserve someone who wants you for you. We all do.”

She straightens her top and smooths her hair. “I thought it was just a bit of fun.”

“Are you having fun?”

She meets his gaze deliberately. “I guess not.”

He starts shifting positions to lie with his back on the table and stare at the ceiling. Margaret sees what he’s doing and motions for him to put his head in her lap instead of face the other way like he was going to. She leans down and plants a kiss to his forehead and rests her hand there. It’s a gesture he’s familiar with.

Hawkeye visits home a year into his residency. Dad asks after all his friends by name and asks him to give the chief of medicine at Marlborough Memorial his personal well-wishes.

“And how’s your shiksa girlfriend?” he asks as well.

“Pffft,” Hawkeye laughs through his teeth. “I don’t think you can call her that.”

“Hey, I was married to your mother for fifteen years. I still get Chanukah cards from your Bubbie Ada every year, do I not? I am uniquely qualified to call her that.”

“Yeah, well,” Hawkeye says, already feeling an uncontrollable smile coming on, “things are going really well, actually. Like, the real thing type well.”

Dad smiles, too. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Hawkeye says, almost laughing, since he almost doesn’t believe it himself.

“And it doesn’t alarm you that she’s a…?”

“A woman? No, Dad. She’s wonderful, marvelous, spectacular, hilarious, genius, and drop dead gorgeous. I defy anyone who’s met her not to be in love with her.”

Dad shrugs. “Works for me.”

“And on top of that, she likes me,” Hawkeye adds.

“A crucial ingredient.”

“Mm-hm.” Hawkeye mimes swooning and falls into a kitchen chair. “Little old me, in love! Who’d’a thunk it?”

“Don’t say that, you’re very lovable,” Dad says, placing a mug of hot chocolate in front of each of them.

“Thanks. I just meant for a bitter old cynic. I know I’m lovable,” he says more earnestly than he perhaps intended.

“Listen,” Dad says, “and when I ask this next question, you know I’m not pressuring or prying or anything. I’m just curious, okay?”

“But when are we going to get married?”

“I’m just wondering if it’s on your mind.”

Carlye had mentioned it the other day, absently, or else trying to subtly plant the idea in Hawkeye’s mind. _Carlye Pierce_ , she’d said, _has an all right ring to it_. There had been other things, a follow up to turn it into more of a joke and less of a direct proposal, but Hawkeye hadn’t been able to hear over the blood rushing in his ears. He doesn’t know why it scares him so much, or alarms him more like. He’s thought it over, and he doesn’t even think he’s deluding himself about being in love with her for the sake of some kind of adherence to heterosexuality and expectations of him; that would be so wildly out of character he’d have himself institutionalized on the spot if it's true.

He loves her, and he’s afraid to marry her.

“Yeah,” he answers his dad. “It’s on my mind.”

He’s not afraid of commitment, never has been. He dives headfirst into friendships, relationships, hook ups, academic societies, summer jobs, and library cards. No. He’s afraid of all the new reasons people will find for leaving him, once they inevitably do.

He has to go into work the day after Carlye leaves. He sits dejectedly in the staff lounge, staring into the middle distance over a lukewarm cup of coffee waiting to be needed. Nurse Duvall takes the seat across from him and casually asks after Carlye. After all, hardly an hour has gone by in the last three years that they haven’t been at each other’s sides.

“Where’s your better half?”

“I thought you would’ve heard by now.”

She takes a moment to process what he’s said combined with the look on his face, the grease in his hair, the temperature of his coffee, and gets the picture.

“Oh, Hawkeye. I’m so sorry.”

He laughs, bitterly. “Everybody seems to get right away that she’s the one who left me.”

“Hawk–”

“Everybody seems to already know that I– that I loved– ugh. That I loved her more than she loved me.”

“Oh, Hawkeye.”

“Oh, Hawkeye,” he repeated in precisely her tone. “I’ve been hearing that a lot today.” 

He doesn’t want people’s pity, although he knows he’s acting pretty pitiful. He hardly wants their sympathy so he’ll make himself as unsympathetic as possible. He wants everyone to leave him alone and he never wants to be left alone for more than five minutes ever again. He prays that he’ll be paged to surgery then curses himself for it since that means he was praying for someone to be sick. Then he remembers there is no God and prayers don’t mean shit on an operating table and he takes a sip of coffee.

“You’ll be okay, Hawk,” Duvall tells him. “You’re very resilient.”

“Sure thing,” he says flatly. “Good old Hawk, he can really take it on the chin.”

He doesn’t know if it would be better or worse if he were more fragile. Some people seem to think he’ll shatter at a single touch. Others think he can make it through anything. He guesses they’ll all just have to wait and see.

Hawkeye finds himself in Mulcahy’s tent after a spat (a fight, a row, a quarrel, lovers’ or otherwise) with who else?

“BJ’s annoyed with me,” Hawkeye begins after Mulcahy asks him what the problem is. He paces around the tent in his robe as he speaks. “He always gets like this when he gets a letter from home where Peg’s telling him about something she’s gotta take care of around the house, or if she talks about her work, or anything that makes him feel like she isn’t gonna need him when he gets back. I’ve tried talking to him, I always try talking to him, but I never say anything right.” 

_I’m sorry I don’t have a kid. I’m sorry I don’t have a wife. I’m sorry I didn’t make myself miserable back home so I could help you be less miserable here_.

“Do you ever tell BJ how much you need him?”

“I– what?” Hawkeye stops in his tracks.

“You’ll never be able to convince him that Peg still needs him; he won’t believe it till he’s home. But you can make him understand he’s needed here.”

BJ would be have to be pretty stupid not to know that.

“Father, he knows he’s needed. He saves people’s lives every day.”

“Those people are strangers to him. Not that he doesn’t care deeply for his patients, but them needing him impersonally, and physically, is quite different to the way a wife might need her husband.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Hawkeye says. _Tell me about it._ He takes a seat in a chair opposite the Father.

“Well,” he says, “who on this camp does he spend more time with than you? Would you need him if he weren’t here?”

“You don’t–” Hawkeye barks a scathing laugh, “you don’t think– he doesn’t see me as a, come on, he doesn’t see me as a stand in for Peg. Listen to yourself, Father, what are you saying?” That thought was altogether too painful, and slightly scary, that people (and not just BJ) thought he was filling or trying to fill a Peg shaped hole in his life. Besides, he would never presume to try to do that. BJ deserves better than him.

“I’m not saying anything, Hawkeye. I’m just saying that you and BJ are very special to each other. Suppose he’s the kind of person who likes to feel needed. So, you can help him feel that way.”

“Uh-huh,” Hawkeye says, because it’s what he always says. A million different responses threaten to spill out of his mouth.

“What’s the matter, Hawkeye?”

He opts for one that won’t make him sound like a lonely interviewee in _Ladies’ Home Journal._

“I guess it’s hard for me to understand how he feels. I don’t, uh, you know, I don’t really… You know, with Radar gone, you and I might be two of the only unmarried men on this camp,” Hawkeye says.

Aunt Eloise, Uncle Keith, and cousins Emily and Andrea are visiting from Portland one weekend the summer before Hawkeye starts med school. Andrea is only sixteen, but Emily is Hawkeye’s age. Thus they’re in near constant competition, which Daniel and Eloise pretend to hate but secretly can’t resist, and see it as the natural extension of their sibling rivalry.

“Emily, why don’t you tell them about you and Paul?” Eloise urges her to talk about her fiancé over the dinner table.

“We’ve got a place together, outside the city,” she says with a smug smile. “With an eat-in kitchen and a lovely backyard. Plenty of room for kids, a dog.”

“You’re living together and you’re not even married?” Hawkeye says, placing an aghast hand on his chest. “Don’t you know the meaning of propriety?”

Emily kicks him under the table.

“How about you, are you seeing anybody, Benjamin?” Aunt Eloise asks rather pointedly for Hawkeye’s taste. Dad looks at him over his wine glass as if to say _I told you so_.

“Ben couldn’t hold down a girlfriend if she was made of flypaper,” Emily says.

Hawkeye has about a million comebacks that he refrains from turning to. 

“No, I’m not. I’ve been a little busy getting ready to start _medical school._ ” He runs a finger along the rim of his glass. “My friend Jeremy is helping me move into my new place uptown. He’s an artist. A fascinating character.”

Emily is eyeing him like she thinks she knows what he’s saying, but she couldn’t possibly. Dad’s giving him a look that tells him not to press his luck and Uncle Keith looks desperate to diffuse the situation. Hawkeye thinks of telling himself that he doesn’t mind, that it doesn’t matter to him that he can’t be himself around his family besides his dad, but it would be no use. He does mind. It actually makes him extremely angry, and the only way to stop himself seething with rage is never to hold back about anything if he doesn’t see why he should.

Hawkeye doesn’t think of himself as a person who causes a scene. Scenes just seem to follow him wherever he goes. It’s not his fault that the world reacts to him the way it does, especially when his main goal in life is basically to have a net neutral effect on the world. (Positive seems ambitious, but neutral he thinks he could handle.) He doesn’t get up to much that he would consider _wrong_ , and he decides not to blame himself when the rules he follows don’t exactly match up with the rules that everybody else seems to think they’re playing by. Basically, he says completely innocuous things that get blown way out of proportion.

So what if Hawkeye is notorious for displays of hysterics. Just because he say the government should end the legal persecution of Japanese Americans and quit developing nuclear bombs? Just because he denounces the institution of marriage and vows to retire early to become a bachelor lighthouse keeper? 

“Don’t be stupid, Hawkeye,” Emily says on one occasion or another.

“It is just like him,” Eloise says, “to make a mockery of my daughter’s happiness like that.”

“ _Him_?” Hawkeye repeats, “I’m right here.” Eloise refuses to look at him. Unbelievable. They think he’s joking.

“Listen, son,” Uncle Keith tells him. “Maybe it’s time to stop making a scene, you know, not every conversation can just be about you.”

“I’m not making a scene!” Hawkeye says, standing so abruptly his silverware clatters to the floor. Okay, so maybe he is. It’s only to avoid the scene he would be making if he was allowed to tell the truth.

“If Andrea said that you’d be fawning over her like she’d just won Miss America, but since it’s me, since it’s crazy, dramatic Hawkeye of course I’m just trying to ruin everybody’s dinner.”

“Jesus Christ,” Emily rolls her eyes.

“Well, if that ruined your dinner so much maybe you should think about why,” he says with finality and storms halfway up the stairs. He comes back down to grab the bottle of red wine off the table and takes it up to his room with him. He doesn’t want to stick around and hear all the reasons his analogy is wrong.

It ends up hardly mattering. It’s not terribly long before Jeremy is telling Hawkeye he’s impossible to be with since his studies always seem to come first. Hawkeye’s heart breaks, and he cries into his cornflakes each morning for three straight weeks, and yet he is somehow unsurprised by the situation, like it’s happened a hundred times before.

“You know, Hawkeye,” Mulcahy says, “it doesn’t look like a one way street to me. BJ needs you just as much as you need him. In fact, we all do.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that.” _Take it back, please take it back_.

“Of course we do!” Mulcahy says almost cheerfully, like he thinks this is what Hawkeye wants to hear. “You’re very important to us here. And we don’t just need you, we love you for it.” Mulcahy goes to place a comforting hand over Hawkeye’s but he pulls away and stands abruptly.

“What the hell? I can’t take that! I can’t take the pressure here. I didn’t ask for any of this, you know. I don’t _like_ feeling like this camp is going to collapse if I take a day off, and half the time people are telling me I’m up my own ass for thinking stuff like that and the other half they’re telling me they don’t know what they would do without me! Well? Which one is it?”

Hawkeye feels like the lynchpin in a grenade the size of the 4077th and he hates himself for it almost as much as he hates the people who put him there. No one person should ever feel as important as he sometimes does, since no one should ever _be_ that important. The world can’t be built on individuals holding it together with both hands, especially not when it’s guys like him who can barely keep their heads screwed on. It’s the exact same problem he has with generals, that they think it’s right that they’re the ones calling the shots, that they actually like it. They think they’re the glue, the gasoline that makes the world go round, but they’re not, because Hawkeye is the goddamn glue, and if they were really the glue then they would hate it as much as he does. 

Mulcahy rubs the bridge of his nose under his glasses while he thinks.

“What if you’d been sent home instead of Trapper?” Mulcahy asks him. “What would have happened then?”

Hawkeye realizes he’s been pacing, maybe even mumbling to himself. He stops.

“Wha– I don’t know. What do you mean?” What a horrible thought that is. What would Trapper possibly have done to deserve that? He hesitates to let his mind go to the next place it’s trying to go, to BJ and Trapper being the ones running this camp, but he can’t stop himself. He pictures them in the Swamp, BJ sleeping in his bunk every night, the two of them touching, laughing, simply existing the way he and BJ do now. For a split second he hates Trapper for it, before he remembers where the hell he is.

“It’s all the things you say, Hawkeye. Wouldn’t the war go merrily on?”

He looks darkly over at the Father and sits back down across from him.

“So what’s the truth? Would everything have been fine? Or do you actually need me?”

“Can’t it be both? You’re always the first to point out that this world, this war is built on insanities, contradictions.” This time when Father Mulcahy tries to take his hand Hawkeye lets him. “Hawkeye, even if you weren’t here, we would still remember you, all the ways you helped us. Because it’s your attitude that’s important, and it will live on when you get sent home. It’s okay to hope you get sent home,” Mulcahy says, anticipating Hawkeye’s protests. “It’s healthy. Don’t feel guilty about wanting to leave. That could never be a sin.” 

“I didn’t think it was a sin,” Hawkeye says quietly. “I just feel bad about it. There’s a difference.”

The only real way to hook up with someone when you’re both over six foot and one of you has obnoxiously broad shoulders is to wait until your bunkmate sneaks out to Major Houlihan’s tent, then surreptitiously haul your mattresses to the supply room and lay them next to each other on the floor in the back, and make sure the door is locked. That’s where Hawkeye and Trapper are lying while they talk.

Hawkeye’s head is on Trapper’s chest, feeling more than listening to the steadiness of his heartbeat, his own fluttering in fits and starts as Trapper traces patterns on his shoulder. Something about Trapper is special, he thinks, in the way they really were friends first, before they started doing whatever they’re doing now, and the way they’re still friends, and the way to the outside observer nothing about their relationship has changed at all. Like maybe Trapper really likes him or something.

“Remember when I said this was a you and me thing?” Trap says quietly, his voice so small it’s almost in another register.

“It’s not?” Hawkeye says.

“Shut up,” Trapper answers affectionately. “When I said it wasn’t a me thing. I don’t know. Maybe that wasn’t quite right.”

“Oh.”

Hawkeye usually worries that he’s a bad influence on people. But either Trapper’s marriage was ruined when he got there, or it won’t be ruined by this, so Hawkeye really can only be happy for him.

“You’re a goddamn trooper for putting up with me, you know that, Hawk?”

 _Fuck_ , it feels good to hear him say that.

“No charge,” Hawkeye says. And it’s really not. He feels so warm and perfect in this moment that he would forgive Trapper anything, and there isn’t even anything to forgive.

“I think maybe I’m glad I’m not married,” Hawkeye says aloud without really meaning to. “So I have fewer people to miss.”

“Yes, somehow I think I can relate to that,” Mulcahy says with a twinkle in his eye. Wouldn’t it be funny if they had a gay priest? Hawkeye locks that thought up to laugh about on a rainy day.

“You know, celibacy notwithstanding, maybe that’s one of the reasons I think you’d make a good priest. It takes skill to get by in this world without… romantic attachments.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Well…”

“Actually, you always say that, Father, but I’m not sure you’re right.” And not just because he would rather die than die alone. “I’m not good at helping with people’s personal problems, because I think they’d all be solved if this stupid war were over. It’s like, what’s even the point in aiming lower than that when everything could be solved in one fell swoop?”

“I think that’s why BJ’s taken to calling you Don Quixote, señor.”

“Oh, please, not you, too, Father.”

“I was merely noticing–”

“I’m just trying to help here, you know. I’m not trying to be a hero. People around here seem to think I’ve got a real martyr complex, but that’s not where my ego is. Sure, I like to save lives, and I’m damn good at it, but I’m not trying to kill myself for the glory. I’m not trying to kill myself in the first place. Father, I just want to go home.” He just still isn’t sure what would happen if he left. “When did you know you wanted to be a priest, Father?”

“Oh, all my life, I suppose.”

“No, seriously.”

“I am serious. I always looked up to our clergymen, the way they were able to provide comfort through their words and actions. Through their faith they were able to give people solace they didn’t even know they needed. I aspired to be able to do the same.”

“Uh-huh,” Hawkeye says, because he doesn’t quite believe him. It’s hard for such a perennial skeptic to understand a religious vocation. Still, as a doctor, he understands something of the call. He supposes he spends most of his time trying to provide comfort through his words and actions as well. “You really think we’re all God’s children?”

“Of course, my son.”

“Then how come we’re where we are? He couldn’t be content to just leave America in America and Korea in Korea? How come I have to be over here dancing An American in Pusan every night because a couple of guys in a tent can’t shake hands and agree to leave a line on a map well enough alone? Where does your God square with that?”

In the hotel room in Taegu he and Margaret talk.

“I don’t understand how you could make this your real life,” he tells her as they both lie there, facing the ceiling, not sleeping together.

“Hm?”

“I mean, I couldn’t even take it when my home life stopped by for two weeks. I don’t think I could take it if– I mean, for your whole thing to revolve around so much death and destruction and–”

“What do you think a hospital is, Pierce? You think there isn’t death and destruction back home?”

“Don’t give me that. Didn’t you want to save lives?” She makes a disgruntled, breathy noise. “Isn’t that why you became a nurse?”

“I wanted to join the army,” she says. “Women aren’t allowed.”

“Ah,” he says. He fidgets with the blanket between them. “I guess I don’t really think women should be allowed in the army,” he says, purely since he knows it’ll annoy-slash-infuriate-slash-outrage her.

“What?!”

“I don’t really think anyone should be allowed in,” he says. “You know?”

“I know, Captain,” she says, possibly just to spite him, or possibly because it’s very funny. He cackles. “What are you laughing at?”

“Captain!” he says. “Does this look like a boat to you?”

“Must everything that comes out of your mouth be a joke?”

“I never joke, Margaret,” he says. “I just say things and people laugh.” He rolls over onto one side and props his head up to face her.

“Do they?”

“I– of course they do. Margaret, I’m hilarious.”

She rolls over to face him, too, and raises her eyebrows. Of all the people he’s met, she’s the one who can really match him blow for blow. Uh. So to speak.

“I think you say things and BJ smiles.”

Hawkeye makes a choked noise in the back of his throat. “So what if he does?” 

“That man is your Achilles’ Heel,” she says softly, placing one finger in the center of his sternum. He takes her hand in his and intends to push it away, but instead he holds it for a minute and rubs her knuckles. He can feel a scar between her second and third where he knows she got stuck with a scalpel last week, since she asked him to get her the band aids.

“Ahh,” he says, and he feels her squeeze his hand back. “So _you’re_ Briseis.”

“I’m what?” she asks flatly. 

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Is this some bullshit you have with BJ?” She’s leaning closer toward him now.

“Yeah.” He’s looking at her mouth.

“Naturally.”

Naturally, at some point they meet in the middle. Kissing Margaret is easy because they’re the same; they like to kiss and be kissed. Half the time he’s focusing on her and the other half he’s remembering Seoul with BJ, sharing a hotel bed and not sleeping together, BJ reciting old Hebrew adages at him like he didn’t know that was the most romantic gesture in the world. Margaret’s mind is somewhere else, too, and she doesn’t once say his name. She hardly makes any noise at all, actually, but they’re both warm, and soft, and lonely, so they kiss till their lips are chapped and don’t bother to do anything more than their hands in each others’ pants. When they wake up Margaret doesn’t think he’s the love of her life. Good, he figures. He’s not.

“Get up,” she tells him, throwing him his uniform from the day before. She’s already showered and changed, and he won’t have time to. She looks a little disgusted with herself, which he tries not to take to heart. He stretches.

“In a minute, dear,” he says just to freak her out.

“Pierce!” she whisper-shrieks.

“I know, I know.” He rolls out of bed and on the way past her to the bathroom leans down like he’s going to kiss her. “Never again, I think,” he whispers into her ear in his best dirty voice when she turns her head.

“Just get changed,” she says stiffly. “The lecture starts in ten minutes.”

He rolls his eyes and saunters into the bathroom. She leaves without him. He skips the lecture and in the most disgusting stereotype of a bachelor imaginable lies in bed and jerks off thinking about BJ. He cleans himself up and goes downstairs eventually, and he and Margaret kind of make peace when they lock eyes across the lobby.

“I think I’m having an off day,” she says, handing him a cup of coffee that she didn’t finish. He sips from the side without her lipstick stain. 

“I think I’m having an off life,” he says. She drives them back to camp. She handles better than he does, anyway.

So the scheme involves a little flirting with Frank. So it was Trapper’s idea in the first place. So and so and so and so:

“You better handle that, Hawk, it’s more your speed.”

“Sure. Yeah.” Hawkeye draws his blanket up and lies sideways with one hand under his pillow. Trap humors him for a few minutes before speaking up.

“Are you sore or something?”

Hawkeye props himself up. “Not sore exactly. I guess I just don’t know what you meant by that.”

“Well, all I mean is… you do stuff like that in your regular back home type life, don’t you?”

_Stuff like that._

“Sure. Yeah. Yes.” To save face Hawkeye offers up one of his best flirty smiles.

“Yeah, well, you see, for me this is really just a you and me thing. Not, you know, a me thing.”

“Yeah.” Hawkeye lies back down and traces a small pattern on his pillow. “I know.”

He doesn’t quite know why it hurts his feelings so much, the various things Trapper can’t say out loud or admit. He supposes it’s not really his place to blame him, that some people’s lives don’t really come together in a way that allows you to be honest with yourself and everybody else, but still. Hawkeye likes to think he’s the kind of person you can be honest to.

And there’s something that rubs him the wrong way when he thinks Trap thinks he’s supposed to be flattered that he’s the only guy he’d ever think about kissing, ever even look at in a sexual way like that’s not him telling Hawkeye that he thinks the way he is is basically wrong, but exceptions can be made for otherwise normal people like Trapper. He’s not flattered, and sometimes it kind of makes him feel like shit, but he also knows that’s his problem, and it’s not as if Trapper is doing it on purpose. The last thing Trap wants to do is hurt him.

“Does BJ ever make you feel like that?”

“B– what? Does BJ–? No! I mean, no, he could never, I mean. BJ isn’t just Trapper two-point-oh to me, you know, he’s, he’s, you know. He’s something different, he’s…” Hawkeye trails off, hoping Sidney will interrupt him, but he never does, not when he wants him to.

In the Swamp, Hawkeye knits while BJ does a crossword puzzle. Everything about BJ says _husband_ even ten thousand miles from his wife. He dotes. He tells Hawkeye not to worry his pretty little head about catastrophes outside of his control. He nags. He tells Hawkeye when he’s being impulsive, compulsive, repulsive, convulsive, explosive, conceited, and strange. He fixes Hawkeye cups of coffee before getting his own. He laughs at his jokes. He smiles at him when he thinks Hawkeye can’t see.

BJ makes him feel something. It’s not that he doesn’t want to tear his shirt off with his teeth and kiss every part of him he can get his hands on because he definitely does, but it’s that he almost thinks he wouldn’t do it if he got the chance since he wouldn’t want to risk doing anything that might jeopardize their friendship. _Friendship_. What an obnoxious, watered down word for what the hell he’s feeling. It’s the being there, together. It’s the synchronicity, the casual way they don’t even have to check that the other is thinking what he’s thinking. And yeah, it’s the unselfconscious way BJ will brush against him, rest his feet in his lap, and take food off his tray like it’s something they’ve been doing their whole lives. That is what Hawkeye is unwilling to risk.

Father Mulcahy had told him it would be hard to stem the tide of love, but it was probably the right thing to do. Hawkeye blames the fact that he didn’t on his general lack of adherence to christian morality and on BJ’s abs. And the fact that BJ will plan a future with him, even as a joke, in a way no one has before.

“If the war is over in ten years, meet me under the clock in Grand Central Station. We’ll go dancing,” Hawkeye says, because he can. 

“I lead.”

“Then you buy.”

So no, BJ doesn’t make him feel like Trapper did, because he thinks maybe he knew what he was getting with him. BJ is uncharted territory, real love, and the picture perfect representation of everything Hawkeye never expected to get out of life. And he seems to love him back very much without caveats except for being married and, ostensibly, straight. Hawkeye felt like an anomaly to Trapper, a blip, a scratch, a ding, a mistake to be rubbed out later. But he thinks he is a person to BJ, and he thinks he might be the reason BJ will have a harder time forgetting the war than he’d like. And that, Hawkeye will never forgive himself for.


	3. sing louder than the guns

“Ah,” Sidney says. “He loves you, so he resents you. But he doesn’t resent that he loves you,” he adds like it’s the world’s brightest silver lining.

“How the hell should I know?”

“You seem to have given it a lot of thought.”

“I’ve got a lot of time on my hands now that I’ve been locked up. You know when you’re not in here I pace around the walls of the room admiring the lovely shade of yellow. Sometimes I think I see faces in the cracked paint.”

“I’m sure you do.”

“All _she_ needed was to be treated with a little humanity,” Hawkeye spits.

“If you’re going to talk about BJ, tell me what you did on the fourth of July.”

“1953?”

Sidney shakes his head slightly. “Don’t do that, Hawkeye, we’ve been here before. You know what I’m asking.”

“I know, I know. ‘Tell me about your mother.’”

“I thought it was the party.”

“Ah ha! I thought it was the bus,” Hawkeye says, feeling clever for having caught Sidney out yet unsure what exactly he caught him at.

“It’s the bus if you want it to be,” Sidney says. “Yes. Tell me about the bus.”

“Sometimes I wonder if she’d be proud of me.” Hawkeye picks at some dead skin on his lip. He wonders if you’re allowed Vaseline in an insane asylum or if some guy once tried to off himself by eating a jar of it or something so it’s banned. He makes a mental note to ask for some but starts to lose track of the thought halfway through. Sidney interrupts while he’s struggling to remember what he was just thinking.

“Your mother?”

“Will you just talk to him, Pierce, while he’s here?”

“Henryyyyy,” Hawkeye whines.

“Impersonating my daughter will get you nowhere fast.”

Hawkeye takes his feet off Henry’s desk and plants them petulantly on the floor.

“What about that other shrink? Freedman. I liked him, get him here and I’ll talk to him.”

“Pierce, this is not about getting you a therapist, though lord knows I’d like to. It’s about you talking to a psychiatrist while you have the chance. Now don’t make me make that an order.”

“You couldn’t order me if it was that or a firing squad.”

“I’m warning you, Pierce.” 

Sherman, Hildebrand, Freedman. That makes this guy, Anfield, the fourth psychiatrist they’ve sicced on him in as many months. He has carefully combed blond hair, distinctive green eyes, and gold oak clusters on his shoulders. Hawkeye is instructed to show up at the VIP tent after lunch for their session.

“Good afternoon, Captain Pierce,” he says, offering a handshake. “I’m Dr. Anfield.”

“Hawkeye,” he says, taking the handshake and then a seat. “But I guess you already know that.” He indicates the file Anfield has open on his desk.

“That’s a very distinctive nickname.”

“Getting right to business, I see. Not even going to buy me a cup of coffee first?”

Anfield doesn’t seem in the mood for games. Serious men are the bane of Hawkeye’s existence.

“Does anybody call you by your given name?”

Hawkeye is so surprised by the question that he doesn’t have time to think of a joke.

“Uh, yeah, my dad, sometimes. And my mom when I was a kid. And my aunt Eloise. My family, I guess.”

“Hm.”

“I– is that– Are you really here to psychoanalyze me from the ground up? To tell me that my nickname is the source of all my problems, my infantile personality? You think I’m regressing to my childhood because people don’t call me ‘Benjamin?’”

Anfield taps his pencil eraser to his chin.

“Why do you think they’ve asked me to talk to you?”

“I thought ‘they’ was Henry. And I thought he asked me to talk to you.” 

“Why do you think he asked you to talk to me, then?”

“Because I’m unstable, loony, nuts, off my rocker. Playing with half a deck, riding without my training wheels, coming apart at the hinges, et cetera. Why else?” Hawkeye puts his feet up on the edge of Anfield’s desk while he talks and tilts his chair back.

“Why does Henry think you need the help of a psychiatrist?”

Hawkeye rights his chair. “I’m unexplained phenomena.”

“What do you mean?”

Hawkeye just barely refrains from rolling his eyes. “I do things that other people don’t understand, because I don’t give a shit about the army. Major.”

“That simple?”

“That simple. If you don’t believe me, why don’t you just gather some testimonials? If you’re so curious why Henry thinks I need to talk to you why don’t you just ask Henry?”

Hawkeye is aware he sounds like a spoiled child when he says things like that. In some ways he is; most boys his age don’t have a father who abides forays into homosexuality and wishes the United States didn’t even have a military. And yet it’s not as if he doesn’t believe what he’s saying.

“It’s not just Colonel Blake,” Anfield admits. “Some Majors Burns and Houlihan advised me to come speak to you, as well.”

“Yeah, but they’re crazy.”

“Oh?”

“Don’t give me that, ‘oh.’ They’re crazy! G.I. types. Houlihan is regular army, you don’t get crazier than that. In fact, I advise you to go and speak with _them!_ You’re crazy if you want to be here, not the other way around.”

“Maybe we should get off the subject of the army.”

“But haven’t you heard? There’a war on! What other goddamn subject is there?”

“What’s your mother like?” Anfield asks abruptly, like he hasn’t read it in Hawkeye’s file. _Pierce, Hannah, Mrs. (d)._ Hawkeye fixes him with his meanest stare.

“Dead. And don’t act like that explains everything.” The war is the problem, not him. And even if he isn’t exactly all there the war is a bigger problem than he’ll ever be, so everyone should just forget about it and focus on what’s really important.

“Did you hear how Andrew Bradley’s mom is marrying that guy from the wharf? Seamus O’something,” Hawkeye asks his father over dinner one night. He’s sitting with one leg curled under him, twirling spaghetti on his fork but not really eating.

“Yeah, I’m invited, presumably since I’ve been Andrew’s doctor since before he was born. You wanna be my plus one?”

Hawkeye chuckles halfheartedly. “I guess it’s been about two years since his dad left,” he says, looking down at his plate.

“I guess it has.” 

Hawkeye’s been thinking about it for days, exactly how he’s going to say what he wants to say, but when the moment comes and he doesn’t have anything planned, he figures something is better than nothing.

“I know you wanted to marry Moira.”

“Ben–”

“Or I know you would’ve if I hadn’t been… I just think– think how happy you could’ve been by now! Think how happy Mrs. Bradley or O’whatever is going to be and like, that could’ve been you if I wasn’t so–”

“Hawk! Don’t think like that. First of all, we can’t undo the past, and second, why do you think it mattered to me so much that you liked her? You’re number one for me, you know that, right?”

“Yeah, Dad, I know.” Hawkeye twirls more spaghetti.

“Besides, if you’re really interested, I was never really thinking about marriage. It was nice to have a friend like that, you know, I–”

“You can say ‘girlfriend,’ I won’t explode.” 

Dad refrains from rolling his eyes but looks like he wants to. “Either way, it doesn’t matter. You know that I’m happy just the two of us, don’t you?”

Hawkeye puts his fork down and sips some water instead.

“You know, ‘Daniel’ is an anagram of ‘denial.”

“And ‘Hawkeye’ is an anagram of… ‘yeehaw, k.’”

“Wha– you– I– did you come up with that right now?”

“We play a lot of Scrabble. What do you think it means?”

“I, uh… never mind.”

Hawkeye learns a lot from his father, including the subtle art of deflection. Dad has him laughing before he can remember he was trying to have a serious conversation with him. A valuable lesson.

BJ is pacing around the Swamp frantically bouncing a tennis ball as he goes. It’s very much a Hawkeye move, which concerns him deeply. 

“I’m worried about you,” Hawkeye tells him.

“Me?” BJ says, mock aghast. “But I’m so well-adjusted. I’m the picture of perfect control.”

“Jesus. At least I can acknowledge that I’m unstable.”

BJ stops pacing. “You’re not unstable. You’re the most consistent person I’ve ever met.” He keeps moving.

“Yeah, consistently unstable.”

BJ tilts his head in concession. “Anyway, I’m fine.”

“Denial’s not just a river in Egypt, you know.”

BJ gives him a pained expression, but Hawkeye knows whatever it is he’ll feel better if he lets it out. The trouble is that BJ sometimes seems physically incapable of _letting it out_ , whatever _it_ is, and most days it feels like Hawkeye has to spend nigh on twelve hours at a time pestering him for even an inkling of what the problem is.

“I’m not in denial,” BJ says. “Or else I’d be getting schistosomiasis.”

“If you’re not in denial then how come you just denied it?”

“You’re not gonna trap me like that, Captain Kafka. I am not in denial.”

“That’s exactly what someone who’s in denial would say,” Hawkeye practically sings. BJ looks ready to pounce on him. Hawkeye rather likes it.

“Why don’t you just leave me alone, okay?” BJ says, his tone hardening. Unfortunately (or not) he just gets sexier when he’s righteously angry. “You and the horse you rode in on, because there’s nothing any of us can do about this goddamn bitch of a–”

“BJ, you’re upset! I wanna help you!” Hawkeye says, standing and blocking his path. _Let me take care of you, please, I’m begging you. I want to bake you the whole world from scratch_.

“I don’t need help!” BJ says, too loud to be believable. BJ only has an inch or two on Hawkeye but right now it feels like he’s towering over him.

“Spoken like a true pillar of stability.”

BJ’s stance relaxes slightly, his shoulders come down from his ears and his jaw unclenches. “Would you rather a pillar of salt?”

 _Don’t worry, Beej_ , Hawkeye thinks. He’s already picturing the day BJ destroys himself by looking back for him.

“I’d rather you let yourself be human,” Hawkeye says. It’s advice people give him all the time so it must be worth something, even if he knows exactly how hard it is to follow.

“I just can’t believe the world out there gets to keep turning while I’m stuck here. It’s the only thing, and the hardest thing to think about.”

“Yeah,” Hawkeye says. “I know what you mean.” He wants to take his hand, or squeeze his shoulder, or kiss his cheek. Nothing romantic necessarily, just something to take the edge off, to remind him that he isn’t alone in this and that they all ache the same to be home with the people they love.

“Do you, though?” BJ says, and it’s just one time out of many that he’s genuinely surprised Hawkeye.

“What? Yeah.”

“What’s even back home turning without you, Hawk? The next time you see your dad he’ll be wearing the same shoes you left him in. Erin, I mean, Erin didn’t even have any teeth when I left! It’s a long fucking war if your dad has no teeth when we get back.”

“Hey, take it easy, Beej, it’s a long fucking war already, you know?”

BJ stops and starts to cool down again, like he remembers all of a sudden that Hawkeye is carrying a whole extra year of this bullshit with him everywhere he goes.

“I guess it’s a long war no matter what,” he says, and sits in the chair beside Hawkeye’s cot.

“Yeah, but it’s the only one we’ve got.”

After an eternity in the O.R., Hawkeye is being bitchy back in the Swamp, and BJ has just about had enough.

“Oh, would you just can it, Hawk, for once?”

“Can it? He wants me to can it! You! The one person I thought I could count on to put up with me, to listen to my problems.”

“Believe me, if that’s all this was, I would be putting up with it because I– because you mean a hell of a lot to me, but I know you and it’s not my fault that you get off on being the most long-suffering son of a bitch in this camp, so don’t take it out on me.”

“You think I’m enjoying this?”

“On some level, yeah!”

“You think I want to be like this? I hate feeling like this! BJ, I _want_ to get help. But you talk to somebody, and they lock you up. I don’t need to be locked up. I’m not… dangerous. I can still help people.”

BJ hovers somewhere between angry and exasperated. “They don’t lock you up for a little cursory complaining.”

“I think I get up to more than that.”

“If you’re so worried about getting locked up why don’t you just not say every single thought that passes through your brain? You ever consider that?”

“Buddy, you don’t know the half of it. Your hair would curl to hear every single thought that passes through my brain.” Well, it would do something.

“Not everybody can do what you do, you know. And it doesn’t make somebody a coward or stupid just because he doesn’t have your, your, your _chutzpah_.” Hawkeye is fairly certain that BJ has definitely lost the plot at this point but he fights with him anyway because he feels like fighting (which scares him, but he’ll deal with it later).

“You didn’t even know that word six months ago.”

BJ throws his arms up and wants to call him impossible.

“Things would be so much easier for you if you could just get okay with not always getting every single thing you want, you know?”

Hawkeye scoffs, open mouthed. “Every single thing I want? You think I go around here getting every single thing I want?” He gestures blithely to the Swamp at large. “Oh yeah, just what I wanted for Christmas this year, dysentery, rat infestations, and fifteen mortar fragments up my ass. Maybe I would get on my hands and knees and pray for the war to end every day if I weren’t such a spoiled brat. Oh, wait!” he says with a flourish and lands on his bed. BJ stares down at him looking almost machiavellian in his bitterness.

“Oh, this sucks, we all know this sucks, but I’ll remind you, Mr. Quixote, that we’re all in this together. I think this is the first time in your life that you haven’t been able to get exactly what you want just by asking.” 

“In my life? What is this ‘in my life?’ What do you know about it?”

“Simple deductive reasoning! Come on, Hawk, your dad lets you do whatever you want, thirty years old and you’re not married, no house to go back to– it’s only a hop skip and a jump to the fact that you were getting the full Christmas list every year.” _My dad?_ Hawkeye files for later that BJ now has a complex about both Trapper and his father.

“Yeah, sure, the full shebang, a bicycle and a train set. What are you getting at?”

“That maybe you are spoiled! You don’t know how to suck it up and be an adult because you’re still a goddamn kid!”

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Hawkeye jumps up and his hands flail as he fights the urge to shove BJ. “Don’t talk to me about my childhood when I don’t know the first thing about you! I mean, Jesus Christ, BJ, don’t you think he was trying to make up for what I hadn’t got?”

They’re properly yelling at each other, and Hawkeye is near tears. He’s tired, so tired, of people thinking he’s strong when he’s not. Of people thinking he’s got it together, which he doesn’t. Of people not being able to make their mind up about whether he can take anything they throw at him or if he needs to be coddled and kept an arm’s length from the war. And he can’t believe he’s even thinking it, but he’s tired of BJ thinking everything was going perfectly for him before he got drafted.

BJ seems to realize he’s crossed a line. He even takes a step back physically from Hawkeye, and takes a deep breath, running a hand across his face. Honestly, Hawkeye’s confused. BJ is the one with the perfect little life. Sure, Hawkeye knows no one can be made truly happy just by following all the expectations people have of them or else it wouldn’t be such a chore to meet them, but BJ seems to be coasting along pretty well all things considered. He comes from sunny California, three generations of doctors, and has a beautiful wife and child waiting faithfully for him back home. Meanwhile Hawkeye comes from a humble little house in Maine where his dad currently lives _alone_ , and every girlfriend or boyfriend he’s ever had has dumped him for being impossible to deal with. His saving grace is that he’s an excellent doctor, but BJ has that, too. So what’s the big deal?

“Hawk, I– I’m sorry,” he says, and goes to close the gap between them, reaching for Hawkeye’s shoulders like he’s going to steady him. Hawkeye steps backward while almost not believing he’s doing that. Move away from BJ’s touch? It’s unprecedented.

“Yeah, well, it’s okay.”

“No, it’s not, I– I never blow up like that, except when I do.”

“Yeah, that’s one way to put it.” At least Hawkeye knows where his thermostat is set. BJ seems to be unaware he’s having a problem until he’s halfway through dealing with its repercussions.

“I think… I don’t know.” BJ sits on his bed and laughs a little to himself. “I think I’m a little jealous is all.”

“Jealous? Of me?”

“Yeah, you… you do whatever you want, say whatever you want. You’re a free spirit, Hawkeye. Sometimes I think… I don’t know,” he says again.

“I guess I am,” Hawkeye says. “I don’t know how to be any other way.”

“It’s, um… it’s impressive that your dad is okay with… it.” _Ah_.

“Everything I learned I learned it from him. He’s not very big on authority either. I guess it’s easy when you’re good enough to get away with it, which isn’t really fair either, but I–”

“I didn’t mean to imply that you had it easy, either, I mean– I don’t think that– I just got a little carried away.”

“I’ll say.”

The tent is very silent.

“You never really talk about your mom,” BJ says quietly.

“What’s to talk about?”

“Hawkeye–”

“I know, I know,” he waves him off, turning away and pacing back toward his bed. “It’s just that I had a very happy childhood apart from the massive dark cloud over nineteen twenty-nine. My life was perfect except for the fact that every kid’s worst nightmare came true for me, but who’s complaining?”

“Hawkeye–”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t make jokes, really–”

“I was just gonna say it’s okay. You don’t have to talk about it.”

Except Hawkeye thinks maybe he should, that it’s healthy to talk about most things, but BJ never makes him talk. He just lets him sleep, or curl up next to him, or belt out songs, or cry, or whatever will calm him down in the next thirty seconds. BJ is very invested in mediating problems quickly, and today the solution is chess. The whole fight lasted all of five minutes, and if you walked in after they set up the board you wouldn’t even know that a screaming match had gone on. BJ has him laughing, riffing, and constructing elaborate backstories for the chess pieces before you could say “Man of La Mancha.” It feels good and like a mistake at the same time. Of course, everything here feels like a mistake, the being here in the first place being the biggest one.

The insomnia doesn’t worry him. He gets bouts of it every so often when his mind is racing just a little too fast for his body and he can’t seem to focus on one thing long enough to lull himself to sleep. He used to get it as a kid imagining all the horrible ways his dad might get hurt or sick, or at the hospital replaying operation after operation and wondering if he couldn’t have been a little faster here, a little slicker there. He gets it now because there’s a war on, in case you haven’t heard, and it’s actually perfectly rational for once to spend all your spare time preparing for various worst case scenarios. What worries him is when he sleeps.

He’s been sleeping ten, eleven, twelve hours a night for a week straight, skipping breakfast and nearly missing lunch each day. BJ must be covering his shifts because nobody seems to notice that he isn’t there, which surprises him considering how much space he usually feels he takes up, how much noise he knows he makes. He guesses people only feel the need to step in and deal with him when his breakdowns are loud; when he’s doing it quietly and alone, nobody cares. Except for BJ.

One day around noon BJ gently shakes him awake.

“Rise and shine, sleepyhead,” he croons. “I got something for you.”

“Hmmph?”

BJ holds two slips of paper out towards him but his eyes can’t focus. “Three days in Seoul. Just you, me, two queen size beds and a whole lot of don’t you call me ‘cause I can’t go.”

“I owe my soul to the company store,” Hawkeye mumbles out of habit, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. “They gave me R&R for what? To cure me of my R&R?”

BJ ignores his question. “You relax, tell me what you want to take, and I’ll pack a bag for you. Klinger got us a jeep in an hour from now.”

BJ drives them into the city during the longest stretch of silence Hawkeye can remember them sharing. He wants to ask for help, for BJ to help figure out what the hell is going on with him, but he’s plain too tired to even try. BJ talks to the lady at the front desk of the hotel and even schleps Hawkeye’s bag upstairs for him.

Hawkeye walks into the room like he’s wading through syrup. He stands in the middle of the floor, puts his hands on his lumbar, and bends backwards, making a small groan as he does.

“Is your back bothering you?”

“Perpetually.”

“Probably because you have horrible posture.”

“Yeah, probably.”

BJ looks a little surprised that he didn’t argue or have some kind of snappy comeback. Not that BJ would have minded; he never gets annoyed with Hawkeye for things like that, and it wouldn’t be fair either since BJ usually has even more of them than he does.

“You sleep on your stomach?” BJ asks.

“You know I do.”

“That doesn’t help.”

“Maybe I’m a masochist.”

“It certainly looks that way. Here, lie down.” BJ directs him toward the bed.

“Hello?”

“What?”

“What are we doing?”

“I’m going to give you a massage, obviously.”

“Oh.” Well. This is certainly going to be something. He lies on the bed on his stomach. “You want me to take my shirt off?”

He hears the smile in BJ’s voice. “If that’ll make you more comfortable.”

“It really won’t.”

“It’s fine, Hawk. Just relax.”

“Famous last words.”

“Whose, Hawk? Whose?”

“Hmmmph,” Hawkeye sighs as BJ shuts him up by pressing his palms to his scapulas. BJ is sitting off to the side as if it wouldn’t be infinitely more convenient if he straddled him, but Hawkeye isn’t even sure he wants to wish for that, since he’s not sure he trusts his body to respond altogether appropriately. He tries not to think about how that is probably a position reserved only for Peg.

“Any good?” BJ says as he works his way down Hawkeye’s vertebrae.

“Would you believe this is my first time?”

“Not by a long shot, hotshot.”

“Hmmph,” Hawkeye sighs again. “It’s good.”

It’s really good, actually, since BJ has definitely done this before ( _don’t think about how the only other person he’s done this for is Peg, don’t think about how the only other person he’s done this for is Peg_ ) and yeah, so maybe it’s a good thing he’s lying on his front, but he’s convinced he’s not crazy for being turned on by a literal big strong man giving him a tender and careful back massage with his calloused and dextrous hands.

BJ walks his them down to Hawkeye’s lower back, the source of all his loudest and most bitter complaints, and Hawkeye lets out a moan a might more enthusiastic than he intended. BJ’s movements pause infinitesimally, but he tries to continue like he didn’t notice, which Hawkeye thinks he appreciates.

“Trap never did this for me,” he mumbles into the blankets. That makes BJ pause again, but this time he covers it up by shifting his hands up Hawkeye’s spine again.

“You were close, but you were never this close?” BJ asks, his voice just this side of joking.

“Something like that.”

BJ gives him one last rub all over then settles besides him. Somehow everything they’ve ever done has managed to be more intimate than sex. Trap never let feelings get in the way of anything, and BJ certainly has feelings for Hawkeye even if he doesn’t know what they are. It pains Hawkeye even to think this, but sometimes he wonders if BJ isn’t better off in the dark, like what he doesn’t know can’t hurt him. If BJ can’t even process maybe, just maybe liking Hawkeye then he won’t have to beat himself up over feeling unfaithful. Hawkeye, lover of truth and Socratic rationality hates those thoughts on principle, but BJ brings it out in him.

“So now are you going to tell me what’s wrong?” BJ asks once Hawkeye rolls over onto his back. BJ lies on his side and props his head up, looking down at Hawkeye with their faces inordinately close.

“I would if I could, I swear, but I don’t even know what’s happening to me.” He puts his hands over his eyes until he sees spots and then lifts them away, blinking in the brightness of the room. BJ shifts so they’re lying next to each other, parallel on the bed and facing the ceiling.

“When’s the last day you remember feeling normal?”

“October 24th, 1929.” That’s the day before the stock market crash. 

“C’mon, Hawk.”

“Okay, okay, I don’t know. When’s the last day you remember me being normal?”

BJ chuckles. “You’re right, I can’t recall a single day like that, actually.”

Hawkeye smiles. “Probably a week ago, I guess.”

BJ puts his hands behind his head and his elbow nudges Hawkeye’s ear. He wonders if BJ feels it as sharply as he does, and if he does, why he keeps it there, why each time they touch manages to be less yet more sensual than the last. Hawkeye feels awake for the first time in days.

“We haven’t had a heavy day in a fortnight,” BJ says.

“Must’ve happened on a light one.”

“What?”

“Whatever it is that’s keeping me up nights.”

Hawkeye draws his knees up to his stomach and rolls onto his side, facing away from BJ, who gets up and flicks off the light switch. He probably knows Hawkeye will fall asleep even faster now, but he doesn’t seem interested in torturing or psychoanalyzing him. He seems to be trying to make him as comfortable as possible, which is what you do for someone with a terminal illness and days to live. A chill runs down his spine as he thinks of his mother in the hospital being made as goddamn comfortable as possible, and he feels a second one when BJ gets back into the bed with him instead of into his own, and mirrors his position so their backs are just touching as they both lie above the covers in their clothes.

“ _Gam zeh ya’avor_ ,” BJ says, and Hawkeye’s whole body is alight. “You know what that means?”

Hawkeye tries to speak but he can’t. There’s no way BJ knew that. He learned it for him.

“This too shall pass,” BJ explains, moving closer so his back is supporting Hawkeye’s. “This too shall pass.”

The army shrink is asking about his mother. He doesn’t want to talk about her.

“Why can’t you tell me about her?”

_Her memory is supposed to be a blessing, you bastard. I won’t be dragging her into a place like this, letting you make her into ammunition against me. I won’t, I won’t, I won’t, and you can’t make me!_

“Do I owe you something here? I didn’t sign up for this, you know. I haven’t signed up for anything I’ve done in the past six months, least of all this. I’ve been conscripted from one goddamn continent to another and straight into this room and I’m fucking sick of it. I can’t tell you about her because I’m not telling you anything. Don’t take it personally, I just don’t like strangers poking around in my nutshell.” He taps his temple with his index finger.

Anfield sighs. “You were perfectly happy to tell me all the things you hate about this place–”

“And what’s not to hate?”

“Why don’t you tell me about something you love. One happy thought, and then we’ll call it a day.”

“And what are you gonna put in your report if I don’t? Is there even gonna be a report, or is it straight into the room with rubber walls for Hawkeye the hysterical?”

Anfield smiles joylessly, his lips stretching into a thin line. “You’re not crazy, Captain Pierce. Insubordinate, impertinent, and annoying, maybe, but they can’t lock you up for that. Yet.”

Ah. Now that makes him nervous.

“‘Yet’ being the operative word, I imagine.” Now Hawkeye has to stay until he can actually convince him he’s sane. Difficult when he’s never quite sure himself.

“So, tell me about your old lady,” McIntyre says, reclining in his cot _._

“What?” _He wants to hear about my mother?_

“Your wife?”

“Ah. Oh. No, I’m not married. Can’t stop moving long enough.”

“Oh, no?”

“Guess I’m a free spirit,” he says with his best smarmy grin, his gaze deliberately flitting to McIntyre’s lips before returning to his hazel eyes.

“No kidding,” McIntyre says. He looks lost in Hawkeye’s eyes for a second before snapping back to reality, though maybe Hawkeye is just projecting.

“There was someone once, but his family didn’t approve of a girl off the streets like me,” Hawkeye says with a coy roll of his eyes. McIntyre has to consider it for as second, but he laughs in the end.

“Louise is waiting back home for me with the girls, Kathy and Becky,” he says. “They’re wonderful, I can’t wait to see ‘em again. I swear if they grow more than an inch while I’m gone I’m gonna lose it.”

“That’s rough, I’m sorry,” Hawkeye says. Jesus, he can’t imagine what it would’ve been like to be ripped not just from your life but from your family like that.

“Still,” McIntyre goes on. “While I’m over here, what they don’t know can’t hurt ‘em, you know?”

“Oh, I know,” he says. He knows what McIntyre means, of course, but he can’t help but file that little comment away for later.

“Trapper John McIntyre?” Jones exclaims as he returns to the tent. “As I live and breathe!”

“Oliver Harmon Jones!” he says, standing to give him a hug and a masculine clap on the back.

“ _Trapper John?_ ” Hawkeye asks. “The hell does that mean?”

“You should hear the stories this guy has,” Oliver tells Hawkeye as he takes a seat as well. “The Dartmouth-Michigan game? He tackled this big running back all with a dislocated shoulder. I mean, we still lost, but–”

“Hey, I didn’t make you justify ‘Hawkeye,’” _Trapper_ says.

“It’s from _Last of the Mohicans_ ,” Hawkeye explains immediately. “It’s my dad’s favorite book. No good story unfortunately, everybody just calls me that since I was a kid.”

“Yeah, well,” Trapper says. “It’s a college nickname, and it’s not a good story either.”

He’s being so cagey that Hawkeye doesn’t press the issue. He even goes out of his way only to refer to him as _John_ for the first two weeks they’re there, but _Trapper_ catches on and soon it’s all he is. Hawkeye loves being _Hawkeye_ , or at the very least he’s neutral about it; he can hardly remember a time when he was anything else. He doesn’t even know what the problem is, but he hopes as time goes on Trap isn’t burdened by this. (He calls him _Trap_ because at least it’s his nickname for him, and no one can tell him it’s got a bad story.)

Hawkeye falls or simply is deeply in love with BJ when he dyes all his clothes and everybody else’s clothes red for him while he was off being crazy. The love redoubles every time he sees the red henley faded to pink, or BJ’s horrible mustache, or his Chuck Taylor’s because it means he’s not really crazy. Or if he is, it means it’s one of the things BJ loves about him (because BJ does love him, there’s no other explanation for it, even if he isn’t in love with him as such).

But then… there’s an element of it that’s still off, that’s still sideways. Hawkeye’s the weird one, the crazy one, the eccentric, but he wears his uniform every day. After two years he still wears the same boots as he did when he got there. Meanwhile BJ the family man has rebellion all over his face, his chest, and now his feet. Hawkeye doesn’t know where to put that, if it’s his influence or if it was always there. _It’s love, it’s love_ , he tells himself, because it has to be, and he clings on to it in one way or another whenever he can.

He clings onto it when they’re in the showers and BJ tells him he has an ink stain in his hairline and doesn’t even wait before rubbing it out himself. He clings onto it when BJ walks so close to him it’s like he’s trying to meld their bodies together, something Hawkeye has done so often but never imagined he’d be on the receiving end of. And yeah, he clings onto it, along with his last shreds of sanity, when he dreams of making French toast for BJ in his childhood home in between nightmares about shellfire and drowning in lakes of blood and algae. _You do things to me, BJ Hunnicutt_ , he thinks. _I would raise a goddamn family with you. I take back every reservation I ever had about marriage and if not for the laws of this land_ – he nearly makes himself laugh – _I would meet you at the altar tomorrow_. 

Of course he wouldn’t, because nobody on the planet is more spoken for than BJ, except maybe Peg. But Hawkeye loves him, and he loves him even more for the fact that he loves his wife too much to be disloyal to her. He would’t be BJ if he didn’t.

Currently BJ ( _perfect, beautiful, faithful, charming, handsome, brilliant– stop it, Hawk, you are_ embarrassing!) is staring teary eyed at a blurry new photograph of Erin that came enclosed in Peg’s last letter.

“Let me see her,” Hawkeye says gently. He’s standing above BJ’s bed but he takes a seat next to him. BJ kisses the photo and hands it over. Hawkeye’s sure Erin’s a lovely girl, but she does look like every other baby. Even so, he’s inexplicably (okay, how inexplicable is it, really?) moved at the sight of her, and almost goes to kiss her picture, too, before he remembers she isn’t actually his daughter. 

“Do you think you’ll ever get married?” BJ asks dreamily. “I can’t wait till we’re going on double dates, renting a cabin in Tahoe or strolling through Central Park or whatever it is you do.”

How does BJ do that? Always know just where to hit him but never seem to know that’s what he’s doing.

“Uh. Don’t worry about it, Beej, if all else fails I’ll just take Margaret.”

“You want to bring Margaret on vacation with us to Lake Tahoe?”

“I didn’t know we were going on vacation to Lake Tahoe until thirty seconds ago! That’s hardly enough time to get married.”

“Well, you should hurry up and make time since I’d much rather bring your wife than your old army buddy.” 

“What about you? You’re my old army buddy, aren’t you?”

“No, we’re not in the army. This is just a dream we’re having.”

“Oh, oh, of course.”

Internally, of course, Hawkeye is still reeling from _bring your wife_. He’s not sure why, since he’s referred to some kind of hypothetical husband more times than he can count; it just seems easier to make the word come out of his mouth. BJ really can’t process reality on any level, huh, but maybe even he notices how discordant it sounds.

“Hey, sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean to upset you.” Hawkeye realizes he’s still clutching Erin’s photograph. He smooths the edges where he accidentally crinkled them and hands it back.

“It’s okay,” Hawkeye says. “Will there still be room on your trip for a lonely bachelor?”

“Always,” BJ says, nudging him with his thigh. “I couldn’t leave you behind.”

Hawkeye is happy for BJ that this all feels like a dream to him. He’s jealous, though, and thinks it’s a little unfair that that means he has to experience reality for the both of them. But that’s how things work with them; if there’s a weight one of them can’t carry, the other will do it, no questions. So BJ wades through life like a dream, half of himself here and half of it back home while Hawkeye experiences it twice, but at least it’s with his whole self. Right? Right.

“You and Captain McIntyre are awfully close,” Anfield, the army psychiatrist, observes. “Inseparable, some people say.”

“I always like to travel with a sherpa. It’s dangerous to go alone. Did you know a dozen people have died trying to scale Everest? That’s as many cases as I took in the last O.R. session. I read about it in National Geographic. Mount Everest, I mean, not yesterday’s O.R.”

“You see McIntyre as a guiding figure, then, leading you safely to the summit, to use your metaphor.”

Hawkeye looks up from examining his cuticles. “Yeah, I lean on Trapper. Sure. If I didn’t lean on something I’d just fall over.”

“You don’t think it’s important to learn to be self-sufficient?”

“No man is an island, Doctor,” Hawkeye assures Anfield. “I think you need to learn how to be loved.”

“You think McIntyre… loves you?”

Hawkeye’s stomach turns and he can feel his heartbeat in his wrists. _Reel it back, scale it in, whatever the hell it is, just do it_. He will not implicate Trapper in his flighty bullshit.

“I thought you could follow when I spoke metaphorically.”

“Maybe you’re just too quick for me.”

“Maybe I am.”

“Everyone always just calls you ‘Father,’ Father. Do you ever wish people would just call you by your name?”

Mulcahy smiles. “Everyone always just calls you ‘Hawkeye,’ Hawkeye. Do you ever wish–”

“Oh, come on, that’s different, Father. Hawkeye’s my name, it’s– it’s my name.” It’s something is what it is. It’s something, and it’s his, and it’s home, in a way. And it’s childhood and it’s fantasy and it’s adventure and storybooks, and it’s fun and fanciful and it’s who he is at this point.

“Oh?”

“Well, yeah. It’s–” He struggles with how to explain it. “My dad’s called me it since I was a kid. I doubt your friends on the playground used to call you ‘Father.’”

“No, I suppose not. You know, plenty of people around here probably think that’s an army nickname you’ve got yourself. Not that you seem like much of a sharpshooter, mind you.”

Hawkeye rolls his eyes. “You really know how to hurt a guy.”

“To answer your question, it used to bother me sometimes. More like worry me, actually. But it doesn’t anymore. In fact, struggling with that helped me to further understand my place here.”

“You think we’re all looking for a father figure? Where does that leave Colonel Potter?”

“Ha ha! I think you’re looking for stability,” he adds good-naturedly but serious. “I’m someone who follows rules because I choose to, not because the army tells me I have to. I’m one of a few people on this base who’s in control of his own life. It’s not very fair, perhaps, but I think that distinction means something to some people.”

“What a novel idea,” Hawkeye says, looking down, examining his cuticles, “being in control of your life.”

“Would you say you’re disillusioned with the American way of doing things?” The newsman asks him for the camera.

“Disillusioned…” Hawkeye mulls over the word. “Would I say I’m disillusioned? I’d say I’m drafted. And I’d say that’ll disabuse you of any illusions you might have had pretty fucking quickly.” He makes an apologetic gesture about the swearing.

“It’s okay, go on.”

“Things like liberty and justice for all, you know? I mean, how free of a country is it really if they have to conscript you into the army? Soldiers, doctors, corpsmen, cooks. It’s the people who sign up to be here that I think are crazy.” He combs through his hair once with his fingers. “Of course, they think that I’m crazy that I didn’t sign up to be here. But it’s the being here that makes me crazy, you know? Sorry, I don’t know if I feel like I’m making sense.”

“It seems like the not making sense is really rather a part of it.”

“Yeah. I guess if I’ve gotta be confused then the people at home might as well get a taste of it, too. The more people know how rotten this whole shebang is the faster I hope something might be done to stop it. That must be why I never really shut up. I don’t have power here, none of us do, people don’t back home either, especially not on their own. But boy, can I talk. So I do what I can in the faint hope that one day people might join me, you know? It’s a lonely business, peace-mongering, but somebody’s gotta do it.”

The day after BJ threatens to break Basgall’s neck, he’s drunk when Hawkeye gets back to the Swamp from the hospital.

“Long day at the office, dear?” Hawkeye says, pouring himself a martini to join him. He reclines on his cot. BJ staggers over and sits opposite him in the dentists’ chair.

“Just having one of those days,” BJ says.

“Somehow I think I’ve been having ‘one of those days’ for the past two years straight.”

BJ takes a sip and stares at the ceiling.

“I think you make me crazy, Hawkeye. I think you’ve made me crazy,” BJ tells him.

“Fuck you,” Hawkeye says almost genially. “If that’s true then you were always crazy.”

“Insanity is contagious, Hawk. I was fine when I got here.”

“Then you’re the only one.”

Hawkeye says that, but he’s not sure if it’s true. He’s not sure if he turned up a little more banged up than most, and if he did if his banged-up-ness is somehow rubbing off on BJ. 

“It wasn’t too scary, was it?” BJ says, “When I jumped on Basgall yesterday?” He slowly punches the air to indicate what he means. 

“Of course not,” Hawkeye says. “Hey, you were very brave.”

“That’s me. Brave. And strong.” _I’ll say_. Hawkeye’s gaze flits to BJ’s hands, then his pectorals, then his arms, then all over his face.

“After all,” Hawkeye says, “he only had one good leg, so it was definitely necessary that you contemplated murder.”

“I was just defending your honor,” BJ sighs. “I’ll always protect you, Hawkeye. You’ll need it.”

Hawkeye lets that hang in the air for a few moments. BJ Hunnicutt, his very own knight in bloodstained armor.

“So which is it?” Hawkeye says, because he’s desperate to know.

“Which is what?”

“Do I make you crazy, or have I made you crazy? I guess I always knew you were crazy about me, but so is everybody around here.”

BJ hums, and turns to look at him.

“Your eyes are very blue.” _Why are you telling me this?_

Hawkeye laughs nervously. “Okay.”

“You’ve got a scar just there,” BJ says, reaching over and touching above Hawkeye’s upper lip. He flinches slightly but doesn’t move away.

“Okay.” 

BJ relaxes back into the chair.

“You’re crazy, Hawkeye. Crazy beautiful.” _WHY ARE YOU TELLING ME THIS?_

“It’s not fair to lead a guy on like that,” Hawkeye says.

BJ closes his eyes and smiles. “Who’s leading you on? Can’t I tell you you’re beautiful without you making a big thing about it?”

“It’s not me making a big thing. You talk like that and they lock you up.”

“Then they should have locked you up a long time ago,” BJ mumbles before he drifts off.

Hawkeye doesn’t trust himself to deposit BJ back into bed without making a huge racket that defeats the purpose, so he gathers up BJ’s blanket and splays it over him. He places a hand gingerly on his forehead under guise of checking for a fever should anyone walk in. Mostly he’s feeling for if BJ’s head is still screwed on right. Mostly he’s imagining planting a kiss where each fingertip is then laying his head in BJ’s lap while they sleep.

 _So he definitely knows,_ Hawkeye thinks. And the way he was talking, it was almost like Trapper, almost willing to risk everything back home for a few cheap thrills in Korea. Except first of all, Hawkeye is no cheap thrill; he is a classy date. And second of all, BJ’s life was perfect when he got here. Hawkeye won’t have him going home with everything ruined. He’ll protect him. He’s going to need it.


	4. running from the rain

“Good morning, Hawkeye.” Sidney catches him sitting legs akimbo on the bed, using the wall as a hard surface to try and write a letter.

“Sidney,” Hawkeye says, crumpling the blank page and continuing to fidget with his pencil as he turns to face him.

“Any luck?” Hawkeye has been bemoaning his inability to write his father about being here.

“Not yet. And don’t even bother asking if I think I know why, because I’ve been thinking about it. I know I’m not embarrassed, since Dad taught me never to be ashamed of stuff like this. I used to always worry I was crazy not because that would be embarrassing, but because it’s fucking scary, as you already know.”

“Sure.”

“My dad did his best, I mean, more than his best, like, so best that I can hardly believe he did it, but it’s still hard for the life lessons of one man to counteract everything the whole rest of the world is teaching you.”

“Yes,” Sidney says, pulling up a chair and settling in opposite Hawkeye. “We know you struggle with reconciling contradictions in what you were taught growing up with what they expect of you here.”

“Uh. Yeah. I guess when you put it that way it seems obvious.”

“Everything does in hindsight. What do you think you want to say to your father?”

“Do you want to say hello to anybody back home?”

“Yes, I’d like to say ‘hello’ to Harry Truman, and I’d like to know why Bess hasn’t written me back.”

“You actually wrote her?”

“Yes, I wrote her a very heartfelt letter.”

“Maybe she’s too touched to respond yet, huh?” Roberts banters with him.

“No, I think she doesn’t like me, I mean that’s the only conclusion I can draw. I was very specific about what I liked about her, I even suggested a few things and she hasn’t written back. I mean you’d think I’d at least’ve heard from Harry. Could’ve at least called me a son of a bitch. He’s done it for others.”

“Seriously, Captain, anything you’d like to say to your family, friends?”

“Sure, sure, yeah.” He looks down the camera lens and his mind goes almost immediately blank. “Hi, Dad,” he manages. “It’s Hawkeye. I’m sure that’s not what they put up here,” he indicates the lower third where they’ll display his name, “but it’s still me. At least I hope so. I, uh…” he looks away from the camera. “Sorry, I can’t think of anything to say. And that’s a first for me.”

Hawkeye is always forgetting what he’s doing. He’ll start doing something in the middle of doing something else, and then can’t remember what he was supposed to be doing in the first place. He starts writing a letter in the middle of putting his uniform on. BJ tells him he looks silly with his pants around his ankles like that. When he looks back at the letter he can’t remember who he decided to write. He puts one shoe on then decides to brush his teeth. He nearly leaves the Swamp like that, until BJ stops him, and holds up his other boot, looking concerned if only mildly. He–

“When was this?” Sidney asks. He flicks back a page in his pad of paper with his brow furrowed.

“When was what?” Hawkeye asks. “All the time.”

“But I mean, can you give me a specific instance? This isn’t like the other stories you were telling me. You haven’t described anything like this before.”

“What do you mean, of course I’m sure.”

“Sounds like an awfully dangerous way to do surgery,” Sidney says, looking up.

“It never happened in surgery,” he asks, suddenly never having been so sure of anything in his life. “Ask anybody, I never screwed up in surgery from being, uh… from losing my… train of thought,” he manages to finish, quietly. Even he can see the pitiful irony in that statement.

“Surgery,” Sidney says. “You can’t have never screwed up.”

“Of course not,” Hawkeye agrees. “Everybody screws up sometimes, I’m man enough to admit that.”

“Did you do any surgery that day? The fourth of July? 1953?” Sidney says, preempting his question.

“Surgery?” Hawkeye says. “Boy, did we operate.”

In the back of his mind while Colonel Potter is chastising them, Hawkeye wonders what it will look like when a prank finally goes too far. Yes, they nearly seriously injured a three star general by slicking the floor of post-op with margarine before his inspection, yes they got caught because they didn’t leave enough plausible deniability for it to have been some kind of genuine accident, yes Potter is working double time to convince the general not to press charges. Just another Tuesday as far as Hawkeye is concerned.

“You are unbelievable,” BJ says barely under his breath as they leave the colonel’s office. He even storms off in another direction.

“Wait! Beej! Come back! Are you seriously upset about that?” Hawkeye chases after him and snags the fabric of his shirt. BJ turns around.

“I just thought you’d know better by now, huh? Don’t you worry about what’s gonna happen when they finally stick you with something? What’s gonna happen to– you know what, never mind.”

“What, what?” 

“Things would just be so much easier for you if you would just shut up and cooperate for once.”

“I–”

“I know you don’t take orders,” BJ anticipates his protest, “I know you don’t believe in them, but seriously, what do you think you’re going to achieve? You’re so smart, so why do you act so crazy?” _Hawkeye, you’re smart, but you’re dumb_.

“Everybody’s always telling me that. Since I’m a kid everybody’s always telling me that, it’s like a compulsion for you people, to tell me I’m smart but I’m dumb, and I’m impossible to boot.”

Hawkeye doesn’t really expect this attitude from BJ anymore, where he’s scolding him for being irrational and hot-headed since they’ve both seen how BJ can blow up. That’s kind of what makes it worst of all, that even BJ, who loves him the most out of everybody, who seems to love more of his flaws that Hawkeye ever thought possible, even he doesn’t love this about him, his need to constantly be fighting authority and getting justice. He doesn’t even think BJ is one of the ones who doesn’t think that’s what Hawkeye cares about, in fact, BJ believes in the cause just as much as he does, just not always in his methods. He doesn’t buy into the righteous anger, instead he thinks you can get by on rational explanations and negotiations alone. Still.

People think Hawkeye is naive for trying to fight for what he believes in, but he thinks BJ is the naive one. Hawkeye knows you never get what you want by asking nicely, not really. If you want something you have to fight for it. Too many things have been taken from him while he sat back and waited for everything to just get better.

“I’m thinking about you, you know,” BJ tells him. “As much as I– as much as I care about you, and your happiness is my happiness, this isn’t actually coming from a selfish place. I honestly think you’d be happier if you just could rein in your schtick for fifteen minutes and see how the other half lives.”

_It’s not fucking schtick. It’s me. It’s me!_

“Beej, I can’t just do what people tell me for no reason. You tell me I’m not rational enough but it’s the irrationality that I can’t stand. I have to do what I think is right, don’t you know that by now? Don’t you see it’s important to me? Don’t you care?” And why do they always have to air their dirty laundry right in the middle of the compound like their drama is being televised?

“Hawkeye, look where it’s got you. It’s turning you bitter.”

“It is not.”

“You’re downright curmudgeonly.”

“I am not curmudgeonly! I’m a laugh riot.”

The ridiculousness of the situation stops them both for a moment. They are a million miles from home fighting with the person they care most about in the world about the best way to fight a war against a war.

“Can you answer me something?” BJ says. “Just honestly answer me?”

“I… can try.”

BJ seems to appreciate that. “What do you want them to say to you? Because I think if they sent you home while I was still here you might self-flagellate yourself to death.”

He stares at BJ for a long moment, hating whatever shreds of truth there are to that. Yes, he wants to go home more than anything in the world, but if it were him or BJ he knows what he would pick in a heartbeat.

“What do I want them so say? I want them to say I don’t have to do anything anymore. I don’t want anymore responsibilities. I don’t– I never even wanted to be chief surgeon, I just… I found out halfway through that people here rely on me, but that’s not who I am. Beej, I’m comic relief, you know, I’m, I’m, yes, I bite my thumb, sir, but not at you, sir, you know. I don’t belong in a war story.”

“But it’s like you said. Even _Romeo and Juliet_ had comic relief.”

“Mercutio dies. And that’s not a war story.” BJ doesn’t answer. “I would be so content to live in the shadows of my betters. I don’t want the fame and fortune.” He pauses, and raises an eyebrow. “I’m like Gummo, the secret fifth Marx brother.”

BJ groans. “You know what, if you’re not going to take this seriously then why do I bother?” BJ starts to walk away, which is even more infuriating than usual because that was not a joke but a very apt metaphor.

“What? That’s not a joke! That’s just true! Wait! Beej!” He catches up to him again. “That’s not– not everything I say is a joke, you know. I’m not some kind of– I’m just a regular person is all.” Because he thinks sometimes that doesn’t come across.

“Yeah? Well maybe this is what you get for joking all the time, no matter what you think you’re doing. I mean I really think it is a compulsion for you, and you don’t even seem to notice you’re doing it. Doesn’t that worry you?”

“I– sure, now.”

“People are going to think you can handle anything if you keep acting like you can.”

“What? No, nobody could be that stupid. Everybody knows this place is getting to me. Everybody acts like they know it’s getting to me most of all, the way they always threaten me with the loony bin. It’s if I don’t joke that I’ll go crazy.”

BJ shakes his head. “I don’t think they understand you, Hawkeye.” Which is one of the things that hurts the most.

Hawkeye doesn’t think he’s all that complicated, but he acts just a little out of the ordinary and suddenly people don’t put any effort into understanding him at all. Sometimes, the way no one listens to him, he feels like he’s screaming from underwater.

All the wind has been taken out of their sails. They go back to the Swamp and collapse on their cots and stare at the ceiling.

“How do you do it, Hawkeye?” BJ asks dreamily. “Why do you do all this?”

“What’s all this _all this_? I’m doing absolutely the bare minimum to stay sane.” Hawkeye rubs his hands over his eyes. “I’m just doing what anybody would do.”

“Yeah, but can’t you see you’re not? Can’t you see you’re the only one doing it?”

Hawkeye actually glances around like there was supposed to be a crowd of people rallying behind him.

“I guess everybody else was busy.”

If Hawkeye doesn’t do something about it, no one will. _It_ being, well, everything, so at least he’s always got something to do. Today it’s hiding all the jeep tires and gasoline on the entire camp so the three three-stars who visited over the weekend can’t go back up to the front and order up more contract killings. He considered taking everything he collected and throwing it into the minefield hoping it exploded, but the noise would scare Margaret so he’s settled for secreting them anywhere he can find, in essence creating a kind of elaborate scavenger hunt for their visiting brass. It feels like he can’t objectively be doing more than creating a nuisance (no matter how much he’d _like_ to be doing much more than that), so the response of all involved can’t help but seem a little out of proportion.

First of all, he’s being threatened with demotion, which is abjectly hilarious. He actually has three separate generals there in Colonel Potter’s office demanding he be locked up in a psych ward, shipped to Leavenworth, and all but sent back to his father in a pine box. Considering the scale of what he actually did, he thinks he may have garnered something of a reputation as someone who needs to be stopped, or put out of his misery. Potter gallantly comes to his rescue with the caveat that he’ll handle him himself, which means a stern talking to after the cavalry (sorry, infantry) have gone home.

“Pierce, you are one finicky son of a gun,” Potter tells him once they’re alone. They had to wait an extra hour because Hawkeye refused to reveal the location of anything they couldn’t find themselves, so they had to wait for reinforcements, i.e. one spare tire, before they could take off.

“Son of a bitch, please,” Hawkeye insists. “That, my father could accept.”

“Pierce,” Potter warns. “For the time being, fine, you act like a child loopy on sugar all you like. But one of these days I’m going to be forced to stop standing up for you, when you finally go too far and I can’t prove to the brass in charge why exactly it is I seem to think you’re so indispensable.”

“Uh-huh,” Hawkeye says, nonplussed. It’s not news to him that he’s thoroughly unmilitary, nor that it deep down that actually bothers Potter since he is regular army and does get insulted when Hawkeye acts like that’s a pejorative all on its own. Hawkeye unspools to BJ back in the Swamp, because if he’s silent for more than fifteen seconds at a time all of his hair will fall out, and he likes it hair. It suits him.

“Where do they get off saying all that stuff to me, and so casually, you know? I mean, I’m just a person, with a real life and everything, you know, a regular person, and people will just throw around these threats like putting me away forever in a straightjacket and a room with rubber walls like that isn’t some version of everyone’s worst nightmare. Genuinely, where the hell do they get off?”

“I guess they say it because they think you can take it,” BJ says. He’s throwing a tennis ball back and forth the way Hawkeye taught him is the first step to learning to juggle.

“Half the time these people seem to think I can take anything, that they can just say shit to me like I’m crazy or I’m worthless, and the other half they walk on eggshells around me like they’re worried I’m gonna fall apart at the lightest touch.” BJ raises his eyebrows like maybe he’s placing himself in the latter camp. “They know I’m sensitive. They know I care what the hell happens to all the kids that come through here.”

“Some people might think it’s for show. Some kind of ego trip.”

Hawkeye stops his frenetic pacing. “What?”

“You know, that it’s posturing. The way you care. Act like you care.”

He’s floored. “What? How evil would you have to be for all your caring to be– what? Performative?”

“I don’t know, don’t you think that’s kind of what Charles is like?” BJ says, devastatingly casual.

“My God, I wish he were here to hear you say that.”

BJ smiles and looks down. “They don’t know what to do with you,” he says. “With the best of humanity.” 

Hawkeye’s ears go warm. He isn’t the best of humanity. If he is, they’re fucked.

“I just want to know if I’m strong or if I’m fragile,” he says, “because it certainly can’t be both.”

“I think it’s gotta be, Hawk.” BJ looks back up at him. "Don’t you know that brave people are always scared?”

“That makes no sense.” It’s definitionally impossible.

“Well, what do you want them to do?”

“BJ, I’m begging them to use kid gloves on me! I don’t have any pride, I don’t care who sees me scared. You know, I want to know does Potter think I can take it or not? Because if he’s not going to keep protecting me it means deep down he either thinks I deserve it or I can take it or both, and he’s gotta pick if I can or I can’t.”

“What do you think?” BJ asks.

“Isn’t it obvious?” BJ shrugs. “I can’t! I can’t take it! I want them to stop telling me they know I’m weak and treating me like I’m strong anyway.”

“Okay, Hawk, okay.” BJ takes him by the shoulder and guides him to the floor until they’re both sitting, Hawkeye against the end of his bunk, BJ against the unlit stove. BJ gives Hawkeye a ball of yarn to detangle to calm him down and has the whole unspooled mess in his lap while Hawkeye forms it into a deep purple sphere.

“So why do you, you know, do these things, do you think?” BJ asks as their knees bump on the dusty ground. 

“Isn’t that the sixty-four thousand dollar question.”

“What, you don’t know?”

“I do them because I have to! Not because I’m trying to get caught, I mean, I don’t think–”

“So, what, you know you shouldn’t do it?”

“Morally? No, I think I definitely should. But physically? Sure, I guess so.”

“So, why? You can’t stop yourself?"

“It doesn’t feel like I can.”

“You’ve got compulsions, Hawk.”

“Sure, I guess so, I don’t know. Sometimes it’s like, my brain doesn’t listen to me. My body doesn’t do what I want, or what I know is rational or whatever.” Like right now, when he’s telling his mouth to shut the hell up but it keeps running, just like always. “I mean, but it’s not my fault that the right thing and the rational thing aren’t the same, with regard to my, you know, physical well-being or whatever. God,” he hops up and starts pacing again, his yarn unraveling as he goes. “The same way I’m not in control of my life here, you know, it’s like I’m not in control of myself. And Jesus, that scares the hell out of me.”

“Are you… afraid of something you might do?” BJ asks, the way people always ask if he’s going to hurt himself or others.

“No, nothing like that. Never anything like that. I’m not– it seems like I might be the only man alive actually who doesn’t harbor some kind of secret fear that my true nature is extremely violent and abusive or something. It’s not like I’m worried about what I’ll do when I _lose control_ or whatever. You’re seeing me having lost control. I have no control over anything that’s happening or anything I’m doing ever. It’s happening around me and I react the way I do and I sort of, I mean, I find out what I’m going to do the same time everybody else does. You know?” 

BJ’s expression says _no, I don’t_. BJ who’s never done anything non-premeditated in his life, who doesn’t know what it’s like to have to live without a plan, a different city every summer, everything by the seat of your pants.

“If it’s any consolation,” BJ says, his gaze flitting all over Hawkeye’s face, “you make sense to me. Even if I wouldn’t do them, I still understand why you do the things you do.”

“Ha,” Hawkeye scoffs. “That makes you the only one.”

“Nah, it’s you and me, Hawk. I think it’ll always be.”

 _Always? Don’t say things that make me hope the war lasts, you bastard._ Hawkeye knows there’s no _always_ for him and BJ. This is over when peace comes.

That news reporter guy finds him in the mess tent.

“Mind if I ask you a few questions, for the reels?”

“It’s your nickel,” Hawkeye answers by way of obliging.

It starts off easy. Tell us your name, your hometown, what you miss most about being there. He almost wishes he could be more serious but jokes seem to keep coming out of his mouth no matter what. He doesn’t really mean to, but he thinks he charms the interviewer and the camera crew, as well.

“Do you think you’ve resorted to humor as a coping mechanism?”

“Sure,” Hawkeye says, “I guess so. I probably always was on some level, you know, I don’t think you meet funny people who aren’t really trying to cope with something. I guess I think you can really only be really funny if you aren’t, you know, all there.” 

Roberts laughs. “So maybe you’d say you’re something of a heightened version of yourself here?”

“That’s an interesting way to put it, but maybe, yeah. I mean, you gotta understand everything here is heightened beyond belief. Yeah, I’m a little louder and a little crazier and a little more eccentric than I was back home, but if anything, in proportion to how loud and crazy and eccentric any generals are, I’m holding back. I could be– you wouldn’t want to see me when I’m going full tilt, you know, I think I might even scare myself.”

“I think I’m going crazy.”

“What?” The doe-eyed girl in the tweed skirt behind the desk is certainly looking at him like he is.

“This is the psych department, right?”

“Right,” she says slowly, and closes her magazine. 

“Right. My name’s Hawkeye, I’m a med student here, and I think I’m going crazy.”

“Um,” she says, “that’s not really how it works. Besides, I’m not sure I actually believe you are a student here, so if you could just–”

“What do you want me to do, recite the bones of the hand? Whose offices are here, come on, don’t you have a professor I could talk to?”

She looks him up and down, mildly freaked out, but more like she’s worried for his safety than her own. She pulls out a laminated sheet from below a stack of papers and traces a column on it with a manicured nail.

“Professor Goldstein is having her office hours right now.Room 212B.”

“Brilliant. Amazing. Thank you. I love you,” Hawkeye says, starting to dash up the stairs. “A lady psychiatrist,” he mumbles as he trawls the hallway. “Groundbreaking stuff. Aha!”

He finds the open door in the two-ten wing and knocks on the frame. The woman who must be Professor Goldstein looks at him over half-moon reading glasses, red pen in her hand hovering over a partially graded paper.

“Good afternoon,” she says as cheerfully as can be expected. He knows he looks unwell. He hasn’t slept in three days, he threw up in the bathrooms of two very generous bodegas on the way there, and he has a black eye.

“Listen, Professor, you gotta help me,” he says, stepping into the office and standing over her desk. “I think I’m losing my mind.” He’s even scaring himself; he’s usually such a happy go lucky person. She tries to size him up.

“Have a seat, please,” she says relatively pleasantly.

He glances behind him and spots the brown leather chair she must mean for him. It’s too wide and low for him to cross his legs and he doesn’t think he’s ever just sat in a chair with his feet on the ground before, so he folds his left leg under him and jimmies his foot so it doesn’t fall asleep.

“Thanks, Doc,” he says.

“You’re not in my lecture, are you?” she surmises.

“Ah, no. But I do go here. I’m in medical school. It’s my second year. It transpires I’m going to be a surgeon.”

She caps her pen.

“You know I don’t see patients here, correct? And that I’m not your psychiatrist, uh…?” She inclines her head toward him, asking his name.

“Hawkeye,” he says. “Pierce.” At least he still knows that.

“Marina Goldstein,” she says.

“Good to meet you.”

“You as well. Back to my question.”

“It’s– well– can’t we just pretend it’s all academic? Questioning my sanity is as much a question on psychiatry as anything your students could come up with. I’m worried– I don’t know what’s going on with me– I don’t want to worry my dad– and if I call the police– or an ambulance–”

“That’s all right,” she stops him. “Why don’t you tell me the problem?” She pulls out a pad of paper. Hawkeye’s sure neither of them are quite sure about the ethics of this situation, but what could really be that bad about trying to help out a kid who needs help? He figures it’s what he would do if it were him. 

“I, um.”

The words get lodged somewhere. He is trying to hard to be self-sufficient. It’s the hardest thing in the world, to tell yourself what’s wrong with you, but he knows he has to do it. He has to at least try.

“Take a deep breath, Hawkeye.” Goldstein’s voice is very steady. She has no identifiable accent, like she’s from a movie that takes place in New York.

“Thanks for doing this, you know. I’m not insane– or, I mean, I’m not stupid. I know this isn’t normal or what you’re normally supposed to do, I just… it was the only thing I could think of.”

“And it is so, so much better than nothing. Take your time. I can’t promise you a cure, but I can promise to listen, if you try to talk.”

“I’m talking, I’m talking,” he says. He correct himself, “I’m trying, I’m trying.”

“Why do you think you’re telling me this?” Sidney rudely interrupts. Hawkeye furrows his brow.

“You asked about the party.”

“I asked about the bus.”

“Bus, party, party, bus. _Partibus_. Latin. _Pars, partis_ , dative or ablative plural. To, for, by, with, or from the parts.”

Sidney sighs and leans back. “Tell me about this party, then.”

“As I was saying,” Hawkeye continues with a flourish.

“I can’t sleep,” he tells Professor Goldstein. “When I sleep I have these crazy dreams, I– I wake up sick, and I can’t shake the feeling that I’m falling.” He has an easier time when it’s just the physical symptoms he’s describing. He can handle that particular exercise in practicality. “My– my hands shake, I feel all my muscles trembling. I can’t hold food down, I threw up twice on the way here. Also, I have a black eye.”

“I can see that.”

“And no idea how I got it.”

Goldstein’s gaze flits up to him for a moment before returning to her notepad.

“When I try to remember, it’s like, my mind goes fuzzy. Not blank, exactly, but it’s like, I lose my train of thought, I forget what I was trying to do. It’s like when you walk into a room and can’t remember what you went in there for, but it’s when I… when I try to… think about…” He rubs his eyes with two fists. He hates this feeling, like his mind is working against him and his body.

“Hey, it’s okay. Take a deep breath. Has anything like this ever happened to you before?”

“You mean like a fight? Or the inexplicable lapse in my memory?”

“Either, really. Maybe… I’d say that shiner looks three, maybe four days old at this point? If you can’t remember where you were last weekend, tell me about a normal one. Walk me through your average Saturday.”

“On Saturday…” Hawkeye feels his mouth about to go off on a tangent. Saturdays back in Crabapple Cove, gallery dates in Chelsea with Jeremy, his prom night, trying for forty-five minutes to get off with Genevieve Winters before giving up and agreeing to tell everyone they did. He pulls the hair at the back of his head. “Jesus, Hawk, focus!”

He’s putting the moves on Cleo, a tall girl with black hair and a lanky frame not unlike his own when he feels a tap between his shoulder blades. Tank O’Melinski of star quarterback fame and casual hook-up infamy is motioning for him to follow him upstairs, so he excuses himself and does, figuring getting with Tank now is better than having to wait all night for a shot with Cleo. 

Tank pushes Hawkeye up against the door to close it, and tongues are in mouths and hands are up shirts before Hawkeye can say _hi, sailor, come here often?_ It’s a little rough, because Tank is under the impression that sex with other men has to be particularly manly if it’s going to be rationalized away, and Hawkeye tries to relax things with slow kisses, and leads Tank away from the door and toward the bed by his collar. Almost as soon as they move, though, light floods in, first through a crack and then through the whole doorway.

“What the hell are you doing?” A woman’s voice calls from just outside in the hall.

“What the hell are you doing?” Tank’s voice repeats, suddenly shoving Hawkeye and holding him an arm’s length away.

“What?” Hawkeye says, almost laughing. “At the very least we can go down together. You’re invited, too,” he says to the girl at the door who he now recognizes as Tank’s girlfriend.

“Get away from me, you–” is the last thing he hears before his lights are out.

“No, no way,” he says.

“What is it?” Goldstein prompts.

“There’s no way– no, I can’t.”

“Hawkeye,” she says firmly. “Don’t you want to get better?”

“He kissed me,” he says, tightly gripping the arms of the chair to keep his voice from shaking. “And he hit me.”

“I see.”

“He kissed me, and he hit me!” he repeats, louder. “Who does that? Is that fucked up, or what?”

He’s talking loud, much too loud, practically yelling right there in the psych department, but he can’t stop himself. Before he knows it he’s letting out these sounds, halfway between sobbing and screaming, which he only knows because it’s like he’s hearing them from outside of his body. He and Goldstein both watch him convulse on her leather chair until he wears himself out and rights himself, wiping his weepy eyes and runny nose on his sleeve. She leaves her desk to pass him a box of tissues.

“It was a mistake coming here,” he says.

“No,” she says. “It’s never a mistake to try and get help.”

Sidney blinks at him, and he blinks back. 

“So you’ve been here before.”

“No,” Hawkeye says. “You can’t say stuff like that. My grip on reality is too loose for you to throw around phrases like that.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know you think we’re close to some kind of breakthrough, but there is nothing to break through! I’m telling you that if there was something wrong with me, I’d know.”

That doesn’t look to assuage Sidney’s worry.

“How would you like to see BJ?”

Hawkeye sits bolt upright. “When? I don’t mean to sound desperate, but I am. I literally want to see him more than anything in the world.”

Sidney doesn’t speak until Hawkeye’s pulse returns to normal. “In the next day or so. He called this afternoon to ask if I thought it would be all right.”

“Who cares what you think, I think it’ll be all right.”

One corner of Sidney’s mouth just about flicks up. “That’s why I told him I’d ask.”

“Ah, Sidney, you really do have my best interests at heart.”

“When you see him, I just want you to pay attention to how it makes you feel, okay? And not to beat yourself up if you don’t feel how you expect.”

“How I expect? What do you _expect_ is about to happen here?”

“I don’t know, Hawkeye. I just want you to give yourself a break. Will you promise me that?”

He hasn’t decided if he intends to or not; he’s not in the business of giving himself breaks he doesn’t deserve. But if it means seeing BJ tomorrow?

“For you? Anything.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the “gummo, the secret fifth Marx brother” thing is just a real conversation I’ve had with my friends where they don’t believe he’s real but he is
> 
> Consider the dramatic conclusion forthcoming


	5. when i'm gone

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ** CW for discussion of suicide/suicidal ideation, canon infanticide. relatively tame but i figure it's better to be on the safe side

“Let’s talk about BJ,” Sidney says, after BJ visits and Hawkeye freaks out and Hawkeye remembers and feels bad about every time he told Sidney they’d locked him up for no reason and– he tries to remind himself that it’s not his fault. Sidney doesn’t blame him, BJ probably doesn’t even blame him, since it can’t hardly be his fault if the war drove him insane, can it? It’s not like he asked to be here in the first place, far from it. Mostly he just doesn’t understand why he’s the only one it’s happening to. (Of course, he isn’t; he’s in a hospital full of people it’s happening to, but somehow that doesn’t seem to matter.)

“Yes, let’s,” Hawkeye says, because his brain is letting him so he might as well ride the wave while he can. 

“Seeing him seemed to upset you, fair?”

Hawkeye raises an eyebrow. “More than fair. I couldn’t for the life of me tell you why he thought it would be a good idea to talk about his baby daughter.” Even saying those words, imagining Erin’s little face in a grainy photo, remembering the baby on the– Hawkeye feels sick to his stomach. _I killed her, I killed her, I killed her. Jesus Christ, I killed her._

“No, I–”

“Imagine if they’d made me a soldier,” Hawkeye interrupts, not really having heard Sidney start to talk. 

“Yes?”

“And not a doctor, like if I’d been drafted when I was a kid. Imagine me with a rifle in my hands, being ordered to shoot at people. To kill them. I would’ve–” he stops himself before he says something worrying, but the phrase _I would’ve blown my brains out_ certainly crosses his mind. “And yet?” he smiles bitterly and his eyes sting as they rapidly fill with tears. “They still managed to make me a killer. I guess it’s what they always wanted. But God, they had to fucking break me to do it.”

Sidney doesn’t tell him he didn’t kill her, because Sidney won’t lie to him, but he does sit there and not judge him, and he agrees that Hawkeye would make a rotten soldier.

“I mean, if you can’t even handle this? I wouldn’t want to run into you in a foxhole.”

When Hawkeye laughs it’s a real laugh, the first one he can remember in a long time. “I know, I’m such a wimp!”

“Tragedy of epic proportions and you can’t get a grip? Please. We should all be solid as a rock.”

Hawkeye is crying about as hard as he’s laughing, because mostly he just needs a release. He doesn’t even know how long he’s been in here, but it’s definitely too long to have gone without smiling, crying, or sex, and two out of three very much ain’t bad at this point. He’s like that for another minute before he rights himself and dries his eyes on his sleeve.

“Enough about me,” Hawkeye says. “You wanted to talk about BJ.”

Sidney looks genuinely impressed that Hawkeye isn’t deflecting, and he’s even a little proud of himself for refocusing the conversation. It’s refreshing to be in control of the things that come out of his mouth again.

“Sure.”

“I think about him a lot. Obviously. I mean I’ve been thinking about him a lot, trying to figure out– trying to maybe figure out what it really is we’re fighting about whenever we fight, because I don’t think it’s ever what we say we’re fighting about. One conversation with either of us should be enough to tell you that.”

“Sounds like a worthwhile project. What are you thinking so far?”

“I think sometimes he thinks… I don’t know. I don’t want to be uncharitable, you know, because he’s the most brilliant person I’ve ever met? But I think…” Hawkeye runs a hand over his face. “Lets’s say this: sometimes I think he doesn’t fully grasp the scope of how desperately I don’t want to be like this.”

“Like what?” Sidney asks, brow furrowed.

“You know, crazy!”

“Hawkeye–” Sidney doesn’t like when Hawkeye calls himself that.

“Fine, fine, I know. I mean how I don’t _want_ my brain to be some kind of minefield, and how I’ve spent my whole damn life not changing myself to match somebody else’s expectations of what a man or a person or a doctor or whatever is supposed to be like because I’m, you know, I’m actively trying not be miserable.”

“You don’t think BJ knows that?”

“I don’t think BJ _does_ that. I don’t know what he knows. About me, that is. I certainly think he thinks he sees or knows or understands everything, but then why didn’t he see this coming, huh? He’s given himself the luxury of– okay, no, it’s not a luxury, but whatever it is it manifests itself in him just choosing to ignore things. He gets to choose that!” Hawkeye waves his hands wildly.

He goes on, “He thinks he sees everything but he’s got this goddamn selective reality so he can tell himself he’s not affected by everything we’re seeing here, and sometimes he actually believes it’s working. And it’s not fair when I’m the one who has to know the hell of a toll this is all taking on me, when I’m the one who has to fight with my mind and my body all the time for trying to save me from the truth because _I’d_ rather face reality than feel crazy, and until I absolutely lose it one day– ha ha– he thinks it’s all just rolling off of me.

“Anyway, I don’t know how the hell he could live like that, but he does it every day and maybe I’m– I don’t think I’m jealous but I’m certainly very fucking curious what it feels like.”

Hawkeye realizes he’s been speaking for about five straight minutes, but Sidney doesn’t look worried. He guesses the rules of therapy are different when the monologue is sufficiently self-reflective.

“Whose fault is it if you don’t fit in?” Sidney asks him. Hawkeye leans back and thinks about it. BJ thinks it’s his own fault, Hawkeye thinks it’s the world’s.

“Maybe this is selfish, but I think it depends what kind of person you are. I want to live in a world where it’s okay to be how I am, because I have trouble thinking that I’m the one who’s making things worse, you know? It’s not that I think I’m some kind of shining beacon of humanity, I just– God, I don’t think I could go around worrying that trying to be helpful and kind and funny is dangerous just because I happen to do it loudly or, like, homosexually. I guess it’s kind of risky to do this, but I guess I have faith in my moral code. I really am just trying to help people…” he trails off, realizing why some people think he’s a phony. He would think so, too, if he really were as cynical as he usually says. He sighs. Sidney taps a rhythm on his leg.

“Changing the world is a big mission for one person,” Sidney observes. Hawkeye taps his nose.

“This is a big issue for him and me that you’ve struck on.” 

“He likes to take things one step at a time.”

“And I’m impatient, I like to do everything all at once, I know that, but one step at a time only works if you do actually think you’re gonna achieve something one day. Otherwise you’re resigning yourself to just running on a hamster wheel forever, trapped by some kind of preconception that things never change or getting better, and goddamnit, I cannot live like that! In fact, I– I think it actually makes me angry, I mean I think sometimes it makes me really, really angry that BJ thinks the world is like that. You know, like this, forever. Like when he’ll do stupid shit with me, for me, it’s to humor me, get me to settle down like I’m a child who just needs to tire himself out. I love him for helping me, obviously, but it makes you wonder… Because he’s _choosing_ to see the world that way! And he doesn’t have to. And if anyone in the world was going to see it my way it was going to be him and if even he doesn’t then–”

Hawkeye cuts himself off before having to vocalize the thought that might actually be his greatest fear, that there is no one for him and he’ll be alone forever. Not to mention that that exact thing about BJ is the reason why he isn’t the one having a nervous breakdown right now.

“So BJ is in a different place than you are. Maybe you’re a little out of step. It doesn’t mean you’re alone.”

“But we’re not! We’re never out of step. That’s the only thing about us, we always slot perfectly together.”

“And that’s all or nothing? You have to agree on everything immediately or what, or it doesn’t count?”

Hawkeye hates how often he seems to hear back advice he’s already given to other people, since it makes him feel profoundly useless. A year ago he told Margaret not to wait for the perfect person to come along since he doesn’t exist, and it took a full on institutionalization for him to finally think about internalizing that sentiment. And look at him, he still can’t do it.

“I never should’ve met him,” Hawkeye says. “The thing that brought us together, it never should’ve happened. It shouldn’t be happening. And I would trade all the time in the world with him if it would prevent it. So what is that?”

Sidney nods. “I won’t say it’s not a crazy situation, spending all this time in this waking nightmare here, and trying to reconcile what it even means to fall in love in a place like that. It’s natural to feel like you’re losing your grip on things, when you want the love to last forever but the thing that brought it– that brings it– to end.”

“But it’s not just– it’s like I want to be with him but also I don’t, I couldn’t possibly. Because I love him too much to want to mess up his life. Jesus Christ, when did I become a fucking Jane Austen protagonist?”

“It seems like you’ve already accepted some of the impossibility in all this.”

“That is my least favorite word in the English language, ‘impossible.’ Nothing is impossible if it’s fucking happening. Sorry, I don’t think I ever used to swear this much, but I guess I’m growing bitter in my old age.”

“Hm.” Sidney seems to get what he means. “So it’s complicated, contradictory. How about that?”

“So I just have to what, let it be complicated? Let it not make sense?”

“It’s what the world does best, Hawkeye. Make no sense.”

“That sucks.”

“It is what it is.”

And so maybe he and Sidney see the world a little differently, too.

“It’s against the rules, what I’m doing, you know. Being in love with him,” Hawkeye says by way of asking if they’re going to keep him locked up for it. It’s a little late to do anything about it, but he still has to check.

“I know,” Sidney says. “But you’re not the only one who doesn’t play by the rules.”

Hawkeye nods. He sighs and runs a hand through his hair and sits leaning forward with his elbows on his thighs.

“God, I’m so old, Sidney, and so young at the same time.”

Hawkeye doesn’t want to look up at him because he can already picture the worried expression he’ll be wearing.

“You’ve been through a lot, Hawkeye, but you’re not the only one.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better? The number of people that are handling this better than I am?”

“I’m saying you’re not alone, remember?” When Hawkeye finally does look up, Sidney is smiling warmly. “You think by now I don’t know that’s what you worry about?”

“Shut up,” Hawkeye says, smiling back at him. “What if I want to be an enigma?”

“Oh, you are. To some people.”

Sidney leaves and comes back the next day. This time Hawkeye opens with a question.

“Why do people always think I’m joking, even when I’m being serious?” He’s wondered it for years, he might as well get an answer while he has a shrink there.

“Why do you think that is?” Sidney asks, because of course he does.

“I guess I’m not funny enough.”

“Hawkeye.”

“I don’t know, I don’t know!”

“Well… humor is relative, just like anything. I think sometimes… maybe you do really live in a different world from some other people. The rules about what’s possible really are different for you. Only someone who buys in to your vision of the world is going to know is going to know when you’re joking or not.”

i.e. BJ Hunnicutt. So. BJ thinks he’s funny, therefore he understands how he sees the world. Now they’re getting somewhere.

“No bullshit, Sidney. I think you might be really good at this.”

“What a relief.”

Hawkeye raps his knuckles on the wall behind him. “You ever get the feeling we could’ve been friends, if you weren’t constantly having to treat me for crack-ups?”

Sidney crosses his arms and leans back in his chair. “Ethics be damned,” he says. “I’m taking you to Zabar’s for a fucking cup of coffee the second we land.”

Hawkeye cackles with laughter and settles into a grin. “Best olives in New York.” He sighs. “I get the feeling I won’t be drinking a lot of martinis when I go home.”

“No, that wouldn’t surprise me.”

“I imagine I’ll still be drinking, though.”

“It’s possible. And if you ever want help with that, I have people I can recommend.”

“Great, I’ll pencil in ‘get cured of my alcoholism’ for the Tuesday after I get over my aversion to the color green. Sound good?”

“Hawkeye?”

“Yu-huh?”

“The anger, where’s it coming from now?”

Sidney doesn’t like it when he just says _the war_. Apparently if he can specifically identify what it is that’s bothering him he’ll be able to actually address his problems instead of having to go all quixotically-solve-everything-at-one-or-else-it-doesn’t-count about it. Or something. He clenches and unclenches his jaw while he thinks.

“Don’t think that I don’t feel guilty for thinking this, but I really think I was never supposed to be here.”

“Go on.”

“I’m just not– I’m not cut out for this! Ask anybody. And it’s not like I think some people deserve to be here and some don’t, I mean, I truly wouldn’t wish conscription on my worst enemy. And listen, it’s not like I thought my life was supposed to be easy, like I shouldn’t have problems. I just think maybe I was supposed to have different problems. I thought my big struggle was supposed to be, you know, ‘terminal bachelor in a nuclear family world’, not ‘pacifist in a war zone.’”

A few more days later and Hawkeye is supposed to go back. Actually he’s _supposed_ to go home, but they’re sending him back because war is hell or whatever. Sidney tells him there’s a call for him at the desk. He picks up the phone.

“Captain Pierce?” It’s Klinger.

“This is she.”

“I’m just calling because, uh, they’re sending a jeep for you. Should be there in about an hour, is that okay?”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“What?”

“I mean is it up to me? Whether it’s okay or not?”

“I don’t… know.” He knows he’s freaking Klinger out. He doesn’t care. Klinger spent so long trying to convince everyone he was crazy, let him live it for a minute, see how much he likes it.

“Yeah, well, okay,” Hawkeye says. Something in Klinger’s tone says there’s something he’s holding back.

“It’s just– Major Houlihan said to make sure to call you first, so that when you get back, you know… you know what to expect.”

“Uh-huh. Let’s see… rats, mold, dysentery, shelling– stop me if this is getting too exciting.”

“Yeah, well. Things have gotten a little crazy here since you left.”

“You’re telling me.”

“Just, uh… Just don’t expect everything to be exactly how you left it, you know?”

“Very boring, Klinger. I don’t expect anything anymore. See you in a couple of hours. Oh, and tell BJ to be waiting for me with a pink carnation in his buttonhole. I’m not sure I’ll recognize him without.”

The nurse behind the desk indicates his time is up, so he hangs up before he hears Klinger’s response. Wrong move. 

BJ isn’t there when Hawkeye gets back. So now he knows what Klinger wasn’t telling him. He wants to be angry with him, tell Klinger he’s a cowardly son of a bitch for not saying, or at least yell at Margaret for not telling him to tell him, but he doesn’t have the energy for anger anymore. He doesn’t have the energy for any strong emotions which scares him so much he thinks he would collapse if he could feel the fear. That’s his only thing, his whole being, feeling things strongly. If he can’t do that anymore then there’s nothing, and he doesn’t want to go through life numb, not really.

But he’s not numb yet, and the sinking feeling is following him now, like every move he makes is the world’s deepest exhale as he thinks _fuck, I really had him all wrong, huh?_ Because he left, just like everybody else.

He doesn’t blame him for leaving, not really. Of course he left. He’s BJ, who eats, sleeps, and breaths California. Hawkeye’s not surprised he took the first opportunity possible to get home and see his family, even if the orders were probably wrong. Obviously what’s killing him is that he didn’t leave a fucking note. Hawkeye wants to believe it’s because he couldn’t find the words to describe how important they were to each other, which is what Margaret tells him along with the fact that he only had about five minutes to pack and say goodbye, unlike Trapper who had three whole days, but he doesn’t want to delude himself. Hawkeye was good for him while he lasted, but BJ went back to his wife, which is what he deserves. What they all deserve.

Of course, while Hawkeye is in the midst of getting himself square with the fact that he is simply never going to see BJ again since he doesn’t live on the banks of the river Nile, BJ comes back. Seeing him again doesn’t feel euphoric, but it does feel real, which is a big improvement on the past three years. As in, this is the first time he thinks he’s ever seen BJ and actually believed he’s standing in front of him. Unfortunately, it’s also the first time he’s seen him and not wanted to make out with him so fervently he tastes his soft palate. So maybe BJ isn’t perfect. So nobody is. So it goes.

“I tell you, one thing I’m not going to miss is bologna. Or standing in line to take a cold shower. I’m not going to miss that, either. What are you not going to miss?”

“Lice, dysentery, rats. There’s nothing I’m going to miss. Except you.”

Hawkeye seethes all day. He can’t believe BJ won’t do this one thing for him (ESPECIALLY AFTER HE ALREADY LEFT ONCE), and then he has to leave the party early himself because it’s a goddamn proxy birthday party for BJ’s two year old daughter and Hawkeye? Hawkeye Pierce, you remember him, right? Yeah, he smothered a child on a bus. So. He leaves the party.

“What would you do if I was dying? Would you hold me and let me die in your arms, or would you just let me lay there and bleed?”

BJ is so sure they are going to see each other after the war. Doesn’t he see how that’s worse? Hawkeye will never be able to move on with his life if there’s always this specter of BJ hanging over him, of the life that could’ve been theirs if they’d met in fucking Los Angeles in 1937 or whatever. And Hawkeye doesn’t want to be a ghost to BJ or to Peg either, a haunting reminder of the worst two years of either of their lives whenever they have to drag their perfect little family over to the east coast just to humor him. Everything will be better for all of them if they can just move on. Right? Right.

“What are you even talking about? You’re not dying. You don’t even have a cold.”

“Cone on, just a little so long,” Hawkeye says, because you always tease the people you love for something.

“I’ve got to get back to the O.R.”

“Goodbye.”

“See you later.”

The goddamn fucking horrible stupid problem with BJ is that Hawkeye forgives him so quickly. Or else, he’s able to overlook it for a minute because he won’t be able to live with himself if he squanders his last few hours with him being angry that their goodbye isn’t going well enough. So he lets him take him to the party and he lets him joke about running off with someone and leaving his wife and he lets him lead him back to the Swamp arm in arm and survey it like the ruins of Rome.

Charles is god-knows-where, the remains of his Mozart record lying smashed on the floor by his desk. The still still bubbles away and Hawkeye swears he can hear a pair of rats making the best of their last night on earth somewhere below one of their cots. Another odd thing the war has done to him, make him envy being a rutting rat. Other than that, it’s very quiet. It’s peaceful is what it is. It makes him think he could stay there forever, with BJ, since there’s nothing about it that’s not beautiful anymore. It’s the war that was ugly.

Hawkeye runs his finger along a dusty column of their chess board.

“I guess we lived here,” he says. 

“I guess we did.”

“I wish we didn’t. I guess.”

BJ puts an arm around him. Hawkeye can’t look up from the board, the alternating squares in red and black or he’ll cry or scream or throw up.

“Isn’t that funny?” BJ says. “I wish I never met you.”

Hawkeye laughs, sharp and loud and startled, and leans his whole body into BJ’s side.

“You know it, pal,” he says. “I wish to God I never met you.”

BJ squeezes him and kisses his temple. “Come on, let me buy you a drink.”

BJ makes him feel so warm. All that righteous anger, that furious betrayal is fizzling out of him as BJ pours them what are probably their last martinis here, what are probably their last martinis forever, and is replaced by an exhaustion so deep he’s surprised he doesn’t keel over on the spot. It’s not just physical, three years worth of adrenaline finally leaving his system all at once. It’s the weight of something else, the weight of really knowing for sure now that he’ll always come second for BJ, and that maybe he wasn’t as okay with that all along as he told himself. Maybe he does want to be with him. Maybe it’s okay to want it, really want it, even if he obviously still would never do anything about it. He isn’t really a home wrecker, no matter what Michelle from Barnard says. 

BJ hands him a glass. “What shall we drink to tonight, my darling?”

“Peace in our time?” Hawkeye suggests.

“To you, Hawkeye,” BJ says, and clinks their glasses. “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, you probably haven’t checked with your answering service.”

Weird. “That’s my joke. How do you know that?”

BJ grins. “That’s the first thing you ever said to me. Practically, anyway.” He takes a sip and Hawkeye follows suit.

“What?”

“When you and Radar came to pick me up and your jeep got stolen.”

It’s starting to come back to him. “And you remember that?”

“Of course I do. You did an honest to God double-take when I said ‘Rudyard Kipling.’ I’ll never forget how relieved I felt, finding someone who could keep up with me. Who I could keep up with.”

“No kidding.”

“Would I kid you?”

“I don’t know, Beej. I hope not.”

They finish their drinks and put more gin in a thermos that they’ll share and take their mattresses out underneath the stars and sit there in the breezy summer night, huddled close with their blankets wrapped around them.

“Did you see the map, in the end?” BJ asks. Hawkeye shakes his head since “who won” is fundamentally one of the things in the world he cares the least about. “It’s pretty much the same as when they started. They’re gonna say it’s a tie.”

“You’re telling me I spent all eleven of the last three years pulling children out of a meat grinder for nothing?” And he immediately hates himself for even thinking that, like his role in all this would’ve meant something if they’d _won_. That’s not what he meant. He doesn’t know what he meant. He guesses he knew it was all pointless, anyway, which BJ of all people certainly knows.

“It wasn’t for nothing, the lives we saved,” BJ says. “I don’t think we were here for a reason, but since we were here, at least we could help not make things worse.”

“That’s what you think.”

“I didn’t mean–”

“I know what you didn’t mean, I just– let’s just not. You know?”

BJ nods. He knows.

“I just feel like I never belonged in a war story,” Hawkeye goes on.

“Maybe it wasn’t one. Maybe it was a love story.”

“With who, with you?”

“With life, I don’t know.”

“I don’t feel very in love with life at the moment.” _I’ll tell you who I do feel in love with_.

“But we’re going home,” BJ says, almost without the requisite joy. “What’s not to love?”

Hawkeye looks at him, wishing his eyes could bore straight through to his brain. He thinks maybe he gets his point across. He doesn’t want to make BJ feel guilty by saying something stupid like _I don’t think I remember how to live without you_ so he settles for dramatically sighing and collapsing against his mattress and staring up at the sky. Tomorrow night it’ll be the sky in Maine. Leave it to BJ to ruin the Big Dipper for him.

“I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do when I get home.”

“What about what you said? Small town doctor, family practice?”

“Sure, yeah, I mean, maybe one day. I don’t think I could– I think I can’t have anyone depending on me for a while. I could really go for being a little expendable right about now.”

He feels BJ about to tell him he could never be expendable but stop himself to prevent setting Hawkeye off.

“Then you’ll do what everybody does, Hawk. You’ll see your friends, you’ll cook dinner, you’ll drive along the coast. You’ll go to the movies, you’ll knit your dad a sweater, you’ll rent an apartment in town, you’ll get married.”

“BJ–”

“Sure you will, one day. I’d do it myself but I’m already spoken for.”

“Give it a rest, Beej. People don’t– people don’t want to settle down with me, I’m married to my work, remember?”

“Nonsense, Hawk. That’s why we love you.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You’re a catch!” BJ props himself up so he’s leaning on one elbow looking down at him. “We love you _because_ you care about your work more than anything in the world, that’s what makes you special. That you really mean it. When I see your heart breaking over patient after patient, or throwing yourself so wholeheartedly into every single medical call, I mean, that’s why I want to be your friend.” BJ throws himself back down on the mattress beside him. “I’ve never met anybody who sticks to their principles the way you do no matter what the hell else anybody says. You’re magnetic.”

“Would you cut that out? I don’t wanna listen to that right now, I just–” he’s about to say something crazy. “I just wanna be here, now. With you.” Since according to BJ, all the reasons he loves him are precisely the reasons everybody else left him.

BJ looks over at him, searchingly, but as always, he obliges.

“Sure, Hawk. Whatever you say.”

And so they lie there, not sleeping, not even touching, no matter how desperately Hawkeye wants to reach over and take BJ’s hand in his. He wouldn’t even have to interlace their fingers, just feeling his callused palm would be enough. But he doesn’t move. And God! What the hell kind of cruel joke is it to make him meet the love of his life during a war? Just the kind he deserves, Hawkeye figures, considering all the cruel jokes he’s played on everybody else.

“You asleep, Hawk?” BJ asks, though Hawkeye’s sure he can tell he’s awake.

“Yes. Leave a message with my answering service. Oh, Klinger–!”

“Shhhh!” BJ reaches over and covers Hawkeye’s mouth with his hand while trying to suppress his own laughter as well. Hawkeye grips his forearm and doesn’t let go even once he’s torn it away from his face.

“Guess it’s really curtains for us, huh?” Hawkeye says while BJ’s still sitting slightly awkwardly over him.

“Won’t be a dry eye in the house.”

“Yeah.”

“Hey. Come here.” BJ relaxes his arm and motions for Hawkeye to lay his head on his chest. Well, who would Hawkeye be to deny him that? BJ strokes Hawkeye’s hair with his free hand. BJ does make it very hard not to love him. 

“You’re gonna be okay, Hawk.” He kisses the top of his head. “You’re gonna be okay.”

Hawkeye wakes up in the Swamp, which means BJ carried him there. He could swoon. BJ’s already a cup of coffee deep by the time Hawkeye finds him in the mess tent.

“Morning, sleepyhead.”

“Hrmph.” Hawkeye slides in next to him on the bench. He doesn’t eat breakfast. He doesn’t even bother to get his own coffee; he just sips from BJ’s mug and shoves the tray back toward him when BJ offers him his. He keeps his eyes closed and leans his head on BJ’s shoulder and BJ lets him even when Hawkeye doesn’t always afford him the same courtesy, and then BJ leads him by the hand– _actually holding his hand_ – to Klinger’s wedding.

It’s beautifully ironic, of course, the way Klinger is the one staying behind. Then Hawkeye kisses Margaret because… because he kisses her. Because they love each other, and it’s complicated, and they’ve done it before, and he will fucking miss her, too, more than he’d realized. He hugs Mulcahy goodbye because he is a good goddamn person (sorry, Father), and they salute Potter because he’s all right, too. Hawkeye’s never actually saluted anyone who outranks him before, though he supposes Potter doesn’t really outrank him anymore, since Hawkeye is a civilian again now. 

“I’ll miss you,” Hawkeye tells BJ at the top of the hill, because he will. Jesus Christ, he will.

“I’ll miss you. A lot. I can’t imagine what this place would have been like if I hadn’t found you here.”

 _But hey_ , he thinks, _you don’t have to_.

Hawkeye never wants to let anyone go, but he has never not wanted to let someone go more than he doesn’t want to let BJ go. But everyone always leaves, because something about him is impossible, and so BJ leaves, too, which is good. It’s a good thing.

And when Hawkeye sees the stones on the ground, thinks of the hours of the night BJ spent doing it, the way he would have been thinking of Hawkeye the whole way through, they might as well say “I loved you,” which is something, goddamnit. They say “I listened when you talked.” “I heard you.” “You were right.” All things Hawkeye lives to hear. “I knew you,” they say, which _fuck_ , was more than Hawkeye ever hoped for before.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> up next, the actual ending bc in the spirit of e.m. forster i refuse to write things without a happy ending


	6. i guess i'll have to do it while i'm here

It wasn’t a gimmick, or schtick, or some kind of joke when Hawkeye said he’d never be able to shake him. He cannot get BJ Hunnicutt out of his head. He dreams that he’s dying, or he’s climbing the Hollywood sign, or he’s standing in the corner while Hawkeye has a claustrophobic breakdown in the elevator of the Empire State Building, and then he wakes up and looks for him and he’s not there, obviously. And he loves Maine, and he loves his dad, and he loves to be home with his books and his records and all his shit that his dad took from his apartment in Boston but something about him is empty now. Where he used to have hope, the hope that kept him and everybody else sane for three interminable years, now he has nothing. He’d say he’s not mad, but he is disappointed.

BJ writes him almost every week, and he is going to ruin his life if he keeps fixating on Hawkeye like this. It’s Hawkeye’s job to remember, and it’s his job to forget. After all, he’s the one who had a perfect life to go back to from before– before, so he should just fucking do that and leave perpetual bachelors with abandonment issues and inferiority and superiority complexes out of it, you know? As much as Hawkeye aches to know what he’s doing every second of the day, each word Erin learns to say as soon as she says it, the color of Peg’s socks and cardigans, BJ can’t keep splitting his time between coasts like this. He’s going to tear himself apart again, and nobody deserves that, not even Hawkeye.

Even so, Hawkeye pores over every letter, soaking in every detail of BJ’s life back home. BJ writes to him with no discretion, putting down seemingly every thought that passes through his mind, every single thing he observes in a way that says BJ is still in denial about them being apart forever. But it was one thing to be in love with BJ when it was just the two of them, when Hawkeye knew as well as BJ did that they were each others’ lifelines out there, that they would be profoundly and abjectly lost without each other. It would be another thing to have to look his wife in the face and pretend that all he wanted from her husband was friendship in the way people with a white picket fence and a mortgage can conceive of and not that he still spends every second he’s not actively trying not to imagining literally being in her place. 

And so he doesn’t write back, because he doesn’t want to break BJ’s heart, and besides, he doesn’t think he actually knows how to break up with someone, let alone do whatever it is he thinks he has to do to BJ to make things right.

Dad comes through the door with the mail one day. He holds three thick envelopes out to Hawkeye.

“That man is in love with you,” he says, completely serious. Dad is convinced that that’s true and Hawkeye can’t find the words to explain how ridiculous that is.

“Shut up,” Hawkeye says, grabbing the letters and tearing apart the one with the earliest postmark. BJ loves Peg, and he chose her, and he is beyond happy to be home. Sure, maybe BJ loved him in some way, but he never would have acted so beautifully domestic all the time he if understood the depths of how simultaneously miserable and ecstatic it made him. If BJ knew, he would’ve just given it a rest. And seeing as he’s still not giving it a rest, he must just not understand. All the more reason for him to just forget about Hawkeye and go back to his life. He owes that much to his family, anyhow.

“What’s the score?” Dad asks as the teakettle boils.

“Last…” Hawkeye checks the wall calendar, “Saturday, Erin learned that tadpoles are baby frogs, Peg bought a pink bathrobe that reminds him of Klinger’s, and it was sixty-five degrees and foggy all day.”

“No kidding.” Dad sets a steaming mug in front of him. Hawkeye runs his finger over _Hawk_ in the greeting of the letter in BJ’s perfect loopy handwriting where all the letters are all vying for the same space in the word and crowding each other into illegibility.

“I like how he writes my name.”

Dad looks at him over his glasses. “You’re in pretty deep, kiddo. I’ve never seen you like this over someone before. Not about Nick, or Jeremy, or Carlye–”

“You think that makes BJ special? I’m a veteran now, remember? I’m addled from the horrors of war.”

“You weren’t like this in your letters about Trapper.”

“He had better penmanship.”

“Ben…” Dad reaches across the table to hold Hawkeye’s cheek in his hand, feeling where his jawline makes him look gaunt and haggard like he’s reminding himself that he’s really home now. He puts his hand down and stirs his tea some more. “Shouldn’t you tell him how you feel?”

“And how exactly is it that I feel?”

“Do I have to spell it out for you?”

“Well, it doesn’t matter! You’ve heard what’s in these letters, how much he loves to be with his family, how much he loves catching up on all the things he missed. Don’t you see how it would ruin everything to– to tell him? It’s not his fault that I’ve gone and gotten myself– it’s not his fault that he’s perfect and charming and handsome and smart and–”

“And you’re not?”

“What–? What does that have to do with anything?”

Dad shrugs. “I’m saying you shouldn’t count yourself out of the running. Ben, those letters are so… they’re not passionate. They’re not full of fiery emotion the way– jeez, the way you are when you talk about him, I mean–”

“So what are you saying? Doesn’t that make it worse, that he writes me boring letters–? Sorry, letters my _dad_ thinks are too boring?”

Dad rolls his eyes fondly as he laughs. “I’m saying he’s not writing to you about being in love with his wife. He’s writing to you just to write to you. He feels compelled to talk to you, I mean, look, he can’t stop himself sharing his days with you even when you’re three thousand miles apart. Those aren’t the letters of a friend you see once a year at Christmas and lament that you don’t get together more often; those are the letters of someone who desperately wishes they were talking to you in person.”

The kinds of letters you write someone who’s at war. Someone who’s at sea. Hawkeye’s teeth clench as Dad talks and he feels the hint of a lump rising in his throat.

“But that means– Dad, I spent two years holding his stupid marriage together with both hands. The thought of the two of them back there was the only thing keeping him sane and I–”

“I hate to break it to you, but they weren’t the ones keeping him sane. Keeping him safe.”

“No.”

“That was you, kiddo.”

“Shut up.”

“And he misses you. He needs you the way you need him, and I can’t make you do anything you don’t want to, but–”

“Then why keep pushing it?”

“Hawkeye, I don’t want you to lose him when you don’t have to.” Dad knows when he calls him _Hawkeye_ he listens.

 _But I have to, I have to_ , he thinks.

Every morning when Hawkeye wakes up he feels like shit. He doesn’t sleep, not really, since his mind won’t shut up for even fifteen seconds and it’s exhausting. He can hear BJ telling him he’d feel better if he ever exercised, which is why one day Hawkeye goes downstairs wearing basketball shorts, and running shoes, and a sweatshirt from NYU that he has no idea why he owns. Dad is understandably surprised.

“Hey, Ben…” he stops him on his way out. “Where are you going?”

“Out.”

“Yeah. Dressed like that?”

“What, too salacious?”

“Hawk.”

“I’m going for a run,” he tries to say casually.

“Yeah. For the first time in thirty-four years?”

“That’s right.”

“Uh-huh.” A beat. “You’re not going to be very good at it.”

“Well, there should be at least one thing.”

He swears he sees Dad trying to suppress a smile. “Right. Come home in one piece or I’ll kill you.”

“Love you, too, Dad.”

He starts just walking. He’s not crazy; he knows he’ll probably throw up after fifteen minutes if he just breaks into a sprint now. But after a while he can’t hold his legs back anymore and he’s jogging along the side of the road, and before long he’s running at full speed and turning into the trees and heading out into the middle of nowhere and he doesn’t stop until he feels like he’s about to drown in his own sweat. He leans down with his hands on his thighs and waits until his shallow breaths turn deep. Then he yells at the top of his lungs.

“BJ!” he screams. “I LOVE YOU!”

He listens like the love is going to echo around him, but it’s the middle of summer and there’s no snow for the sound to bounce off of. So he screams it again.

“BJ! I LOVE YOU–”

“Hawkeye?”

He yelps. “Holy shit! Michael!” Michael Gillis. Tommy’s father. Out walking a dog in the woods behind their houses, listening to Hawkeye have some kind of Virginia Woolf type breakdown. Solid. As. Fuck.

“How ya doin’, Hawkeye?” he asks with slight trepidation.

“Oh, fine, thanks,” he pants. “Yourself?”

“Good,” he says. “Yeah, good. Well, not good, actually.”

“No,” Hawkeye agrees. “Me neither.”

“Right. Well.” Michael turns like he’s about to continue on, but he stops himself. “Why were you screaming ‘BJ, I love you?’”

“Oh. Because I’m in love with a guy named BJ.”

“Ah. That’ll do it.” Michael is looking at him sadly, more sadly than should be possible, yet without pity. He’s just fucking sad. “Hawkeye Pierce,” he muses. “I don’t think I heard one name more than yours all throughout the nineteen-thirties.”

Hawkeye doesn’t think his heart rate should be capable of rising any more, and yet.

“It’s– I’m sure my dad would say the same about Tommy.”

“Let me walk you home, Hawk.”

Hawkeye nods, and swallows. “Yeah, okay.”

They walk a mile in silence. Michael introduces Hawkeye to the dog, Mustardseed, a large and lumbering bulldog who leaves a distinctive trail of slobber behind her as they go and then they just walk, Hawkeye lopsided as always and limping slightly as he holds a hand over the stitch in his side.

“I remember the day you two met,” Michael says once they’re about halfway to Hawkeye’s house. “We’d been so nervous, with Tommy starting at the new school and all. He was always shy, and a little quiet, and we didn’t know if he was gonna make friends– anyway. He comes home that day grinning wider than I think I’d ever seen before and he tells us that the boy he sat next to on the school bus was the funniest person he’d ever met. I don’t– I can’t remember what he said you’d talked about, but I do remember him telling us how his stomach and face hurt from laughing.” He takes a deep breath and looks up at the trees, the canopy of leaves granting them shade along the road. “He was never shy and quiet after that.”

“He was so good,” Hawkeye says. “Pure good.”

“You brought out the best in him.”

“God, we were just kids. We were always just kids.”

He wants to tell Michael that it should’ve been him. That he would happily trade his life for Tommy’s and have him be the one on this walk right now, but he can’t, because it shouldn’t have been either of them.

“I’m so sorry, Michael,” he manages. “I’m so, so sorry.” 

“Thank you, Hawkeye.” He claps him on the shoulder. “But it’s not your fault.”

He wants to correct him. He wants to say _actually, yes it is, because if I’d been better, faster, smarter I would have been able to save him but I’m too slow and stupid and useless to–_ but he’s not, though. Tommy was dead before they put him on that table, he was dead the minute they sent him over there.

“He loved you, you know,” Michael tells him. Hawkeye is going to fucking cry. “I’m sure this BJ does, too.”

They walk the rest of the way back to the Pierces’ and Dad invites Michael over for dinner and Hawkeye thinks that for a while he and Tommy were pretty lucky for having the only two cool dads in the entire state of Maine.

“I meant to ask before, where was that sweatshirt from, Hawk?” Dad asks in between crunching forkfuls of salad.

“Yes! I was thinking about that, actually, and I remembered. It’s definitely Jeremy’s– this guy I was seeing in med school–” he explains for Michael’s benefit, “and I definitely stole it like twelve years ago.”

“At least now he definitely won’t want it back,” Michael quips. “It’s in almost as bad shape as your son.”

Everyone laughs. Something about this is easy, like how it is when you’re a kid before you know just what the world expects from you. Hawkeye hardly feels like himself anymore (he hardly knows what himself even feels like) and his mind is scattered and shattered in a million places at once all the time, but the three of them around the dinner table like that almost feels like home. He’s getting things back piece by piece and one day maybe the space left over will be smaller than the pieces filling it again.

Time passes. Call it a few months if you have to put a name to it.

“Dad, can I talk to you about something?” Hawkeye asks while his father is cleaning some fish in the kitchen. He’s been thinking about all the things BJ told him he’d do once he got back. _You’ll see your friends, you’ll cook dinner, you’ll drive along the coast. You’ll go to the movies, you’ll knit your dad a sweater, you’ll rent an apartment in town, you’ll get married._ BJ gets about a C+ for accuracy, which is generous but he is the teacher’s favorite.

Hawkeye does see some friends. He freaks Amy out when he badly misjudges his readiness to handle a trip to school to talk to the kids about being a doctor and has to back out the second he sees all their shining little faces peering up at him through the window in the door. He cooks dinner sometimes but he gets distracted halfway through and burns everything from butter in the pan to salmon in the oven. Sometimes even his coffee tastes burnt, and he worries he’s lost the ability to taste it any other way.

He hardly ever drives, but sometimes he rides his bike up the road past Tommy’s house, past Dickie’s and Toby’s houses, past Billy’s house, too, and past the swimming hole and thinks _Christ, the things I’ve seen_. Soldiers soaking wet and caked in mold. Little girls with their skulls fractured and their limbs blown off. Boys with holes in every part of their feet that they put there themselves. Black eyes and broken glass and cheesy mustaches and platinum blonde hair and coke-bottle glasses, guinea pigs and lambs and real juniper berries, desert fires, forest fires, floods, the undersides of canoes, the undertow of the Atlantic Ocean, Los Angeles, California, and the Hoover Dam in 1937. He even sees Billy’s mother at the grocery store and gives her a polite nod over the strawberry display. 

The only place he drives is to the movies, and he’ll only go if they’re playing something he hadn’t seen before Korea. For a week in September they show _An American in Paris_ every night at the drive-in and he goes each day just to close his eyes and listen to the music. They even have it on a record at home, Gershwin at Carnegie Hall or something, but as he still insists on going out he notices himself gravitating toward some semblance of a routine.

“If you’re in trouble I know a very classy abortionist in Montpelier.”

“I’m serious, Dad. I’m thinking about getting a job.”

He breaks down on the way home from the grocery store, everything he bought spilling out onto the road as he sharply pulls his bike over, only realizing he was crying when he could no longer see through the tears. He watches the milk run down the asphalt back toward town, the strawberries get squashed as a cantaloupe rolls over them. He sits against a tree and fucking weeps, and cars go past driven by people he knows recognize him but none of them stop, none of them even hesitate with their foot over the brake which just makes him cry harder as he wonders why the hell if everybody is so worried about him all the time do they never do anything to help. 

Dad looks up from prepping dinner. “But not with me, I gather.”

Hawkeye shakes his head. “I think– I don’t want to work on an assembly line, but I also don’t think I’m right to… to take care of all these people who I’ve known since before I could talk. There must be someplace that needs me– that needs my help, anyway.”

“There’s always someone that needs your help, kiddo,” Dad says. “I’ll ask around. Are you thinking somewhere in biking distance, or–?”

“I’ve been thinking about trying to get a place in town. In a town. I’m not sure. I have to think about it. I just wanted to float it by you.”

“Thanks,” Dad says warmly. “It must be a good thing if you’re feeling like going back to work.”

“Exactly the vote of confidence I was looking for.”

Dad laughs. “Hey, I’m no trauma psychologist. But I know how much you loved– love– I don’t know– your work. I don’t– I couldn’t stand to see them ruin it for you, it just wouldn’t be– it sounds very childish to say this– but it wouldn’t be fair.”

Hawkeye goes to where Dad is at the counter and makes him put his knife down. He pulls him into a hug in the desperate way that Dad used to before his every semester of school.

“I’ve got you,” he says. “I’m so proud of you.”

“What’s there to be proud of?” Hawkeye mumbles into Dad’s shoulder.

“Hawkeye,” he says. He holds the back of Hawkeye’s head like its going to come unscrewed if he doesn’t keep it there. “You care, so much. You give so much of yourself to care for others, probably more than you have to.”

Hawkeye pulls away but Dad keeps his hands on his shoulders.

“It’s okay that you’re still learning how to balance that, to keep what you have to for yourself. But I’m proud _because_ it was hard for you. I wouldn’t trust a person who wasn’t upset by all that.”

Hawkeye sniffs. He left a few tear stains on Dad’s sleeve. “Thanks, Dad. I love you.”

Dad sighs and smiles. “I love you, too. Here, you wanna help me with this?” The scales are off the piece of fish but it needs deboning. Hawkeye gets to work and the silence is comfortable and comforting.

Margaret cried when her dad told her he was proud of her. She had to pry it out from under his floorboards and he still didn’t say it until Potter told him he should, Hawkeye and BJ had worked out. Dad tells him at every opportunity he gets, since it’s such a casual thing for him, a given to be proud of his son. 

“I’ve hated myself so hard for the last three years,” Hawkeye says, his tone only light enough for the kitchen work he’s doing and much too light for what he’s saying. “Hate, I mean, hate that I’d never felt for anyone before in my life, because I wasn’t strong enough to fight it. I could’ve dodged the draft and gone to prison or told them I was a queer and gotten sent home or let myself get caught and court-martialed for a hundred different things and have stopped adding to the violence but I was scared, scared of not being able to work again, and look at me! They took that from me anyway, and I don’t even have the right to tell myself it’s not my fault because it just is.”

“You think the Korean War was your fault?”

Hawkeye rolls his eyes but Dad doesn’t let up his glare. So maybe it does sound ridiculous when you put it that way.

“You can’t save the world, Hawkeye, but you can’t destroy it, either.”

“That’s nice.”

“You can only try to be helpful and kind, and I don’t know anyone who does those things better than you.”

“That’s what they did, though, while we were over there,” Hawkeye says. “They made it hard to be kind.” He puts his knife down and goes to run his hands over his face but they’re all fishy so he just leans his elbows on the counter. Then he violently catapults himself up and starts talking a mile a minute.

“Even the kindest thing you could do there wasn’t really kindness, you know? Anything nice you did was just a poor substitute for paying back for all the damage we were doing, and I guess it’s not my _fault_ that we were over there but– but where do they get off sending people over there who didn’t volunteer? Where do they get off sending people over there at all?”

“Hawkeye–”

“And that’s just us! We’re royally fucked and we’ve got the brilliant end of the deal! We get to pack up and go home with our duffel bags and our battle fatigue or whatever and call it quits, meanwhile we went over there supposedly to bring something like civilizationor democracy or whatever to half a country that didn’t even want it, and we left it, I mean, way, way worse than when we got there. We fucking ravaged it and I don’t, I mean, you read the newspapers, right? It’s not like I ever thought any good was going to come of this, but literally no good is going to come of this.

“And it shouldn’t be about me but I live inside my stupid head so some of it has to be about me. My life, I guess, I allowed to be about me, but now my life is this _war_ when I don’t think…” he trails off as his breathing becomes shaky and he feels another lump rising in his throat. “I–” he chokes out a sob before he can speak again. “I just wanted to be a doctor when I grew up.” 

_Hawk,_

A week ago, Hawkeye got the strangest letter from BJ.

_Hawk,_

_I think I’m yearning to see you. I think that’s what it is because I remember the feeling so viscerally that I think I might throw up, the absolute need to be somewhere you’re not, with someone you haven’t got. I think you live somewhere inside me, Hawkeye, and you’re gonna need to pay rent sooner or later. (I could never evict you, but one day I might have to come around and collect.)_

It goes on with some other stuff, as BJ would say.

_We take Erin to pre-k three days a week now. 9am to 2pm Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and I’ve been picking up shifts at our local pharmacy to make some extra scratch. I don’t know when I’ll be up for surgery again. I can’t even rightly say I miss seeing patients because I never saw any of my own at SF General, not really._

_I remember you telling me stories about Marlborough, or “outside Boston” as you’d call it to sound more cosmopolitan or else to annoy Charles. I remember endless nights, staying up drinking coffee after coffee because sleeping was worse than being awake, swapping trumped up anecdotes about all the_ ~~ _crazies_ ~~ _bizarre cases we’d seen come through emergency. I never believed a single thing you said, and I believed all of them with my whole heart, you know?_

_We used to be able to see entire constellations when I was a kid. Nowadays we can hardly see any stars. Light pollution is starting to ruin the whole bay area. What stars do you see in Crabapple Cove? I include a question in order that I might prompt a response of even one word. “Orion,” for instance, or “Polaris.” I would prostrate myself for so much as an “Ursa Major,” though that’s probably pushing it. (On a side-note, I think I’m starting to talk like you. Can you tell?)_

_Peg works in an office every day. She works in an office while I stay home with our daughter, which maybe the me from three years ago would have found strange but now I just find very peaceful. Look what you’ve done to me, Hawkeye. You’ve made me admit I’ve changed. Some days I feel like you owe me an apology, but I’m getting used to the fact of not getting one. Are you even reading this? Blink twice if you are. Hawkeye, I’m screaming into the void. Is this how you used to feel when you yelled and kicked up shit and carried on? How did you manage that, Hawk? (“I didn’t,” you would say, or “badly.” Do I have your voice down? Was that in character?)_

_Peg’s newest coworker’s favorite author is James Fenimore Cooper. I met him at an office party and couldn’t find the words to describe you to him, so I said I’d just have to introduce you in person one day. I can’t wait to see you again. I made a promise and I’ll be damned if I'll break my word to you. I think it’s you and me, Hawk, always. On a scale of one to my favorite surgical instrument, you’re number ten. You know that, right?_

_Mainely yours,_

_BJ_

Hawkeye reads the letter a hundred times. He folds it up and keeps it in his shirt pocket so he can take it out and read it again whenever he’s sure he imagined it. Now every time the stairs creak or the doorbell rings, a dog barks or a car honks outside, he’s convinced it’s BJ. Every night he dreams that he’s throwing rocks at his window and every morning he wakes up confused when he’s not there. Hawkeye’s in the living room teaching himself to crochet with NPR idly playing on the radio when the impossible happens.

BJ is at his door. Hawkeye is convinced he is a crazy person.

 _Oh my God, I’m Penelope_ , Hawkeye thinks for a split second as his eyes go wide before he stops the thought.

“Don’t say it, don’t even think it,” Hawkeye says.

“What?”

He grabs the fabric of BJ’s shirt at his chest just to be sure he’s really there.

“It’s really me,” he says like he can read his mind. “I’m really here.”

He hugs BJ like he’s the first person he’s seen in months, like he’s his rescuer come to save him from being stranded on a deserted island. He breaths him in. He smells… clean. Clean, and safe, and warm, but under that there’s the BJ he recognizes, who he’d be able to spot in a crowd of thousands, who’s his and who lives here forever even when he’s all the way across the country. Hawkeye pulls back and looks him all over.

“What are you doing here? Not that I’m complaining.”

“I missed you,” he says. “A lot. And I’m worried about you. You never wrote.”

“God, I– I’d like to bore a hole in you and let the sap run out.” Hawkeye can’t think of anything to say and that’s the first thing that comes to mind. He takes BJ’s face in his hands and basically has to physically stop himself from kissing him. He hugs him again, burying his nose in his neck and breathing in California sunshine and thick rolling fog and BJ, BJ, BJ.

_I love you I love you I love you you’re my person and I don’t know how to live without you and now you’re–_

“Hawk, babe, you’re crushing my ribs.” _Babe?_

“What?” _Call me that again and I’ll scream_. Hawkeye pulls away again and he thinks maybe BJ’s cheeks are slightly more flushed than before.

“Wow,” BJ says as he drinks him in. “It is–” his words catch in his throat. “It is beyond good to see you. There aren’t words for how good it is.”

“Then stop talking and kiss me,” Hawkeye jokes as he steps aside to let BJ in.

“Sorry for bursting in on you like this,” he says and doesn’t cross the threshold. “You don’t have to let me stay if you–”

“I thought I was the crazy one,” Hawkeye says, grabbing BJ by the waist with one hand and dragging him into the house. “I’d let you burst in on me any day.”

BJ sets his bag down near where Hawkeye’s shoes are sitting in a pile. Hawkeye directs him to take a seat on the sofa. He’s still sure he’s hallucinating, but then again that’s never particularly been his brand of insanity.

“Do you want– can I get you anything?”

“Just sit, Hawkeye. I want to talk to you. All I ever want to do is talk to you.”

“Ah.”

Hawkeye sits on the other end of the couch, which feels odd when their entire existence before this consisted of trying to fit the two of them into spaces clearly meant for one person. Hawkeye is overcome with worry that he doesn’t know how to be around BJ when it’s by choice. 

“So,” BJ asks. “How are you?”

“I, uh…” Hawkeye’s lost for words. Not only that, he’s lost for words around BJ. It’s the most unfamiliar of sensations. “I’ve been better.”

“No kidding.”

Something about BJ’s attempt at small talk is off-putting. They’ve never done small talk that’s just small talk. They’ve done small talk that was flirting and bashing the war and messing with colonels, but they’ve never just talked to fill an awkward silence before. They’ve never had an awkward silence before.

“Yeah.”

“Hawk–”

“Beej, I’m hanging on by a fucking thread. Is that what you want to hear? What are you doing here?” he asks again, more desperate this time.

“I told you, I’m worried. Why didn’t you write me?”

“I’ve never been very good with words.” _Ah._ Fighting is so much better than silence.

“Hawkeye.”

“Come on, let’s go somewhere. Let’s take a drive and get stalled in the backseat of my dad’s Chevy, you know?”

Hawkeye stands abruptly and grabs the car keys, then pockets them when he realizes he better write a note for his dad so he doesn’t have a heart attack when his son and his car are both missing unexpectedly.

_Dad– BJ is here. Taking him to Norman’s. Please don’t be alarmed and don’t be embarrassing when we get back. Will pick you up Cobb salad for two bits extra in my allowance this week. Hawk._

“Okay, let’s go.” Hawkeye leads BJ by his arm out to the car and starts driving them to the diner. It’s not actually called Norman’s; they just call it that because it looks like a caricature of an American diner, straight out of a Norman Rockwell, which Hawkeye tells BJ on the way there. BJ doesn’t look away from him for a solitary second.

“Hi, Daisy,” Hawkeye greets the waitress. “The five-course tasting menu for me and my friend here,” he says as they slide into a booth.

“Sure thing, Hawkeye. Can I get you boys some coffees to start?”

“That’d be great, thanks,” he says, taking the plastic menu she hands him. “Beej?”

“Yeah, great, thank you,” he says, still never taking his gaze off Hawkeye. Hawkeye bounces his leg under the table. “You know the whole restaurant can feel you doing that?”

“What?” Hawkeye stops the motion suddenly. “Oh.”

Daisy places their coffees in front of them.

“Let me get the banana pancakes with a side of bacon,” Hawkeye orders.

“And for you?”

“Two sunny-side up eggs with corned beef hash, thanks.” Hawkeye is almost surprised when he has his own order; he’d half expected him to say _I’ll have what he’s having_. Then again, stealing food from his plate will have a whole new layer of excitement when it’s actually different from his own.

BJ leans his elbows on the table and interlaces his fingers. Hawkeye traces their long outline with his eyes and pinches himself under the table. It’s real. This is really happening.

“You can’t be doing this, Beej,” he says.

“Doing what?”

“Dropping everything, coming here. You– you have to let me go. It can’t be healthy for you.” He finally looks up at him.

“And that’s in your professional medical opinion?”

Hawkeye rolls his eyes. “I thought you wanted to forget the war. How the hell are you going to do that when you’re flying three thousand miles just to console your biggest reminder of it?”

“Sure, I want to forget it. I want to forget everything about it, except you.”

“How touching. Except I don’t need you, Beej, your family does.” Hawkeye hates to lie like that, but he’ll do it if he absolutely has to.

BJ looks all over his face. His leg is bouncing again, and BJ touches their knees together under the table and he stops. Daisy sets their food down in front of them and BJ eats. Hawkeye picks all the banana slices out of his pancakes and delicately nibbles at their perimeters.

“Peg and I got a divorce,” BJ says suddenly.

Hawkeye’s stomach drops. He can’t believe he really did it, he really ruined their marriage from ten thousand miles away _._

“Fuck, BJ, I’m so sorry.” He hardly has time to notice how unbothered BJ looks. Besides, he always looks like that. He’d look like that even if his wife left– anyway.

“It’s a big adjustment, yeah, but I actually think it’s a good one. It was the right choice, Hawk, you don’t have to be sorry.”

“Oh, but I do.” _It’s my fault. At least let it be my fault_. “Why didn’t you write me that? I thought… I thought you were telling me everything.” Absolutely nothing had changed about his letters in the past few months, absolutely nothing to indicate some huge kind of life-changing earth-shattering event like a goddamn divorce. The only odd one was the dreamy one that is currently in Hawkeye’s shirt pocket.

“Hawk… don’t take this personally, but I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone everything in my life. Not even–” he chuckles quietly. “Not even myself.”

“So why, I mean… how the hell did that happen? You two were so… Or if you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine, too, I mean–”

“She left me for another woman. And so that I could be with you.”

“I said it was fine if you didn’t want to tell me.”

BJ looks at him and Hawkeye cannot for the life of him read his expression. Why the hell would he make a joke like that? Well, not a joke so much, but that particular lie. Hawkeye knows BJ lies all the time, it’s like Hawkeye with wisecracks and show tunes, but this? Now? But BJ would never be that cruel if he knew what it was doing to Hawkeye.

“Hawk–”

“Let’s forget about it. Your eggs sunny-side up enough? I can’t make ‘em like that anymore because I lose focus halfway through and they end up hard boiled.”

“Yeah, Hawk,” BJ says, sounding more than a little disappointed. “They’re almost as runny as your mouth.”

They eat. Hawkeye taps his fork against the side of his plate.

“You’ve barely touched your food–”

“But are you okay?” Hawkeye interrupts. “Like– what’s– she left you but you’re still– you’re going back, right? I mean, Jesus Christ, what about Erin?”

BJ cuts his freak out short. “I’m going back, I’m going back, relax. We split amiably, Hawk, it’s what adults do.”

“Uh-huh.” Hawkeye runs a hand through his hair. “But it’s your life, Beej! Your perfect life. How are you not freaking out? By which I mean I know you’re definitely freaking out and you might as well deal with it now instead of waiting till it boils over and hurts someone. Namely you. Or me.”

BJ just smiles. “Hawkeye, I’m fine.” He takes Hawkeye’s hand in his across the table for a second and pulls it back when he sees Daisy looking. Hawkeye hopes he isn’t turning red. “Besides, I couldn’t forgive myself if I didn’t come and make sure you were okay. I mean, you just saw how swiftly and completely my life fell apart.” BJ’s still smiling. He manages to look exactly the same when he’s losing it as when he’s fine. “I had to make sure my best friend wasn’t faring any better than I was.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Right.”

“Right.”

By the time they get back to the house they’re almost talking like normal again. BJ seems content to listen to Hawkeye ramble as long as he’s able about all the people he’s seen since he’s been home, the hospitals and apartments he’s looked at, all the different nooks and crannies in town he’s had meltdowns in. They set up a makeshift guest bedroom in the office upstairs together, laying a sheet over the couch and joking just like always that they never learned how to make hospital corners. When they’re done they’re exhausted. BJ lies in “bed” and looks seconds away from sleep. Hawkeye refrains from kissing his forehead and opts instead to drape a blanket over him and head for his own bedroom.

“Not gonna stay and tell me a bedtime story?” BJ mumbles.

“Maybe tomorrow,” Hawkeye says. “I can hardly keep my eyes open, let alone my mouth.”

“That’s a first.”

“Ha ha.”

“When I wake up remind me to give you a kiss.”

Hawkeye shuts the door behind him without dignifying that with a response.He lies awake and wonders what the hell BJ is doing there, and tries not to hope that it’s because he’s– anyway.

The next morning BJ is in his kitchen. Hawkeye cannot look at BJ in his kitchen for too long or else he thinks he’ll go blind.

“Hawk, taste this,” BJ says, holding out a wooden spoon with something red on it. Hawkeye doesn’t know how much longer he can handle real life getting so close to the fantasy. An honest to god shiver runs down his spine when he realizes BJ is cooking him shakshuka. He tries to lick the spoon in a way not suggestive of anything else, and it’s early enough in the morning that he thinks he manages. Also, it tastes incredible. Hawkeye knows his good-food and good-sex faces and noises are too similar, but hopefully BJ doesn’t realize that as he gutturally moans at the excellent quality of the stew.

“What the hell, Beej? Did you always know how to cook? Were you holding out on me?”

BJ grins. “I’ve been learning. Peg’s been teaching me.”

“Did mention that in your letters, either,” Hawkeye observes.

“I was waiting to surprise you.”

“Uh-huh.” Hawkeye hops up onto the counter and starts eating out of the skillet with the spoon.

“Would you cut that out?” BJ snatches it out of his hand. “It’s not finished yet, jeez.”

Hawkeye holds his hands up and hates the fact that he literally would not be acting any differently if they were married. Together. Whatever. He swings his feet and his heels hit against the cupboard below him.

“So,” BJ says as he gets the eggs out of the fridge. At some point Dad must’ve told him to make himself at home. “What do you want to do today?”

“What do I want–? BJ, how long are you even here for?”

“As long as you need.”

“As long as _I_ need? You’re the one who dropped everything to escape here.”

“Peg told me to stay as long– as long as it takes.”

“Peg?”

“I told you we’re still friendly. Or couldn’t you tell that from the letters?”

“Well, how the hell am I supposed to know now if anything you wrote me was true?”

“Hey.” BJ’s shoulders crumple a little. “A few lies of omission don’t mean the rest of it was total fiction.”

“Lies of omission? You omitted to tell me you got a _divorce_. You. BJ. Mr. Married. Mr. Husband. Mr–”

“It’s ‘doctor,’ actually,” BJ says.

“Sorry, _Doctor_ Husband. Dr. Commitment. Dr. Wife-and-kids-and-a-house-in-the-suburb–”

BJ shuts him up by shoving a bowl of shakshuka in his hands.

“Eat,” he says. “I can see your ribs through your shirt.”

“Morning… boys,” Dad says as he comes down the stairs already dressed for work. He definitely stopped himself from saying _lovebirds_ for which Hawkeye is immeasurably grateful. Dad looks pleasantly surprised to find coffee already burbling away in the pot. “Thanks, BJ,” he says, sounding impressed.

“Of course. It’s the least I could do.”

“I’ll never let it be said you didn’t do the least you could do,” Hawkeye says.

“Do you want me to point out every time he uses one of my jokes?” Dad says, filling a thermos. “Would that be helpful?”

BJ laughs.

“Okay, I’m going into the office,” Dad says. “See you later, kiddo,” he kisses Hawkeye on the head, “BJ,” he waves. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

BJ turns down the hob and scoops himself a serving into a bowl. He sighs a little mournfully.

“I hope he’ll tell me if I’m overstaying my welcome.”

“Now you’re worried about that? You show up here unannounced, appropriate his office, infiltrate his kitchen and now you think to ask?”

BJ just smiles since he knows Hawkeye would never talk like that if he was actually annoyed.

“He’s probably glad I’ve got a friend over. He worries I’ll become a recluse.”

He wonders if BJ will pick him up on his use of the word _friend_. No such luck.

“That wouldn’t suit you, Hawk. What would you do without an audience?”

Hawkeye wishes he could be angry with that remark but obviously BJ is right. He loves having friends because he lives for the feeling of making them laugh. It’s an addiction just like any other, and Dad should feel lucky Hawkeye discovered humor before heroin.

As the days pass like that, Hawkeye is starting to feel spoiled. It’s like a surreal little offshoot of his life where he and BJ play house in his childhood home and neither have to worry about work or responsibilities or god forbid having to save anybody’s life. It’s everything Hawkeye ever wanted, except he’s still unable to say the crucial thing out loud because he will still definitely ruin everything once BJ realizes this isn’t all one big joke to him.

They practically go on dates. They’re practically dating. Not to mention that BJ is practically living with him, though he supposes that’s what they always do, go straight from zero to sixty in fifteen seconds flat and practically date and not act like that’s weird. One morning Hawkeye gets up early to go for a run, which is a thing he does now.

“Where are you going?” BJ mumbles. He’d fallen asleep on a makeshift mattress of pillows on the floor of Hawkeye’s room while looking through his books.

“Running,” Hawkeye says. “I’ll be back in an hour.”

BJ sits up and rubs his eyes. “Running? From what?”

“From nothing, Beej,” Hawkeye says gently. “From my own thoughts. It clears my head. I like it, even if it is murder on my knees.”

“Okay,” BJ says. “I’ll come with you.”

Hawkeye wonders if other people would be annoyed by that, by him inviting himself along. But Hawkeye and BJ spent nearly every waking second together for two years and it still wasn’t enough for them. Hawkeye can’t believe he didn’t think to ask him to come sooner, except he can, because as much as BJ is enjoying worming his way into Hawkeye’s routine, Hawkeye still isn’t inoculated against what it will feel like when BJ leaves, because he is going to leave.

Hawkeye obviously doesn’t have any clown shoes, sorry, sneakers to lend BJ, but apparently he brought a pair of his own, somehow anticipating a scenario like this. Hawkeye refuses to read into it. He leads BJ up his usual path and they break into a slight jog together, and work their way up to a regular run.

When he was a kid, Hawkeye specifically curated the route he took to school in order to run into as many people as possible. By the time they rode up to the building he’d be the head of a proverbial gang, all clattering into the bike rack at once and laughing and joking so loud they sometimes got told off by teachers before first period even started. Now when he runs he does the opposite, going out of his way to make sure he always makes the whole journey in solitude. Except for today.

BJ by his side is like the missing puzzle piece he’s been searching for for months, just assuming it was lost and never to be found, or maybe had never even been in the box in the first place. A phantom of a phantom. But now BJ is there, just as he’s been constantly dreaming that he would be, and it’s almost like a miracle, but not quite.

They’re both breathing heavily as Hawkeye leads them down a hill for a bit of respite. Listening to the sound of BJ panting like that makes Hawkeye somewhat worried that he will suffer a bona fide heart attack if he doesn’t get his mind out of the gutter. 

“I’m impressed, Hawk,” BJ says through ragged breaths.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s just a polite way of telling me I used to be really out of shape.”

BJ laughs and has to stop for a second to catch his breath. “Yeah, I guess it is.”

“Come on, let’s just walk,” Hawkeye says, starting to, and putting his hands behind his head. “If we’re gonna talk, I can’t– I gotta be able to focus, I can’t– my mind, Beej, it goes all over the place.”

“Don’t worry about it, Hawk,” he says. He rubs his back for a moment before taking his arm back to start stretching. “Let’s walk.”

They walk.

“Did you change?” Hawkeye asks. “Or is this what you used to be like?”

“What?” BJ looks confused. His breathing is still labored and his cheeks are flushed.

“I don’t mean when I knew you. I mean before the war.”

“What– what am I like now that I wasn’t like when you knew me?”

“You–” Hawkeye touches BJ on the arm and motions for them to stop. BJ stands with his arms crossed and Hawkeye stands with his hands on his hips and they are the two most recognizable silhouettes on the planet. They look at each other. They appraise.

“I can’t put a name to it,” Hawkeye finally says. “You defy categorization, Beej. Isn’t that something?”

“I thought that was your job.”

“Nah,” Hawkeye says as he starts walking again. “I’m indescribable, but there are boxes I fit in.” He smiles and does a little Groucho eye-roll and BJ laughs. “You, I don’t know about anymore.”

“I guess I’ve been doing some soul-searching.”

“I’ll save you some time. It’s twenty miles south of Uijeongbu.”

BJ groans like that isn’t a joke he would make in a heartbeat.

“So… find out anything interesting?” Hawkeye says. He taps the side of BJ’s shoe with his toe.

“I left my wife, isn’t that interesting enough?”

“ _You_ left _her_?”

“I never said I didn’t.”

“I guess I just thought– Jesus, Beej.”

BJ looks over at him like maybe he’s feeling a little guilty. “I left her a note.”

“Very funny.”

“I left you, too.”

“Why would you want to talk about that?”

_You saved me, and you left me, and you make me whole, and you make me empty, and–_

“Because I’m sorry, Hawk,” BJ says.

“Oh.” _Oh._ And that’s kind of all it takes. Not even Carlye apologized for the way she left. She practically said he had it coming.

“Would you come here?” BJ says, borderline irritated. He holds out his arms.

“I’m all sweaty.”

“I’m scandalized. Call me when you’ve been operating for forty straight hours under shellfire and covered in half a dozen types of blood and I’ll _think_ about not hugging you.” 

That night after BJ is asleep Hawkeye creeps down the stairs and finds his father sitting by the fireplace with a newspaper, like he knew he would be. He sighs dramatically to announce his presence.

“Hi, kiddo,” Dad says without looking up.

“Did Mom ever give you this much strife? Did anyone?” Hawkeye says before crashing down on the couch next to him. He swivels and plants his feet in Dad’s lap over his paper, who smiles.

“What’s the matter?”

“I don’t know what’s going on with him! I never know what’s going on with him.”

“Come here.” Dad motions for him to put his head in his lap instead of his feet. He combs through his hair with his fingers like he would when Hawkeye was a kid, lying on the couch with his nose in a book while Dad leafed through medical journals and interrupted Hawkeye’s reading whenever he learned something particularly interesting. Hawkeye feels very parented. It’s warm and it makes him feel lucky.

“You’re good at this, you know,” Hawkeye says. “It’s actually crazy how good at this you are. I tell everybody but maybe I don’t tell you: you’re a very good father.”

“Hawkeye,” he says. “You make it easy.”

Hawkeye actually tears up when he says that, which makes him feel a little pathetic. Still, it’s not news to anybody that it doesn’t take much to provoke an emotional response from him. Besides, that’s not even true, is it?

“No, I don’t,” Hawkeye says. “I’m impossible.”

“You know I’m against violence, but I would slightly like to throttle anyone who’s ever called you that.”

“Dad!”

“You do make it easy,” he says. “You’re kind, smart, thoughtful. Funny. And more importantly, you think I’m funny.”

“Okay, okay, I get it.”

“You always let people tell you you’re impossible, you never let them tell you when they love you.”

“I know,” Hawkeye says, and he knows it has larger implications. He lies quietly there for another few minutes, staring intently at the paint chip in the ceiling that looks like a hitchhiker with all their things tied up in a bandana. Secretly he names it after BJ and thinks how would ask the lonely traveler, the wayfaring stranger to stay forever if it weren’t for Erin. He thinks maybe he’s made peace with the fact that BJ doesn’t want Peg back, but BJ would be an entirely different person, completely unrecognizable to Hawkeye if it wasn’t slightly killing him to be away from his daughter.

“I think it used to hurt my feelings sometimes,” Hawkeye says, “when BJ would talk about what he was doing to Erin by being away.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well… he acted like her getting raised by Peg on her own would be some kind of crime against humanity. And I mean, I would never dream of saying anything like this to him, but she’s not even going to remember it, I mean, nobody remembers being two years old. I just– sometimes I wanted to scream at him _she’s going to be okay! It’s you that’s getting fucked up from this_ , you know? Because… well, you know what I mean.”

“I’m sure he never meant anything as some kind of dig at you.”

“Of course he didn’t! No, he would never. It’s more that he just wasn’t thinking. About it. How it might make me feel. Sometimes I wonder what he thought I was thinking about all day that I wouldn’t make a connection like that.”

“Hm.”

“But I also don’t blame him. It’s not as if I was exactly thinking straight while we were over there.”

“He does seem disinclined to hurt you.”

“But he does it anyway?”

“You know what they say, Hawk. Love hurts.”

Hawkeye takes him on a picnic one evening out by a lake that faces west so they can watch the sunset. It’s romantic, but so is planning to reunite in ten years and go dancing and so is imagining cabin vacations in Lake Tahoe and so is giving back massages and so is spending all night shifting heavy rocks to spell out a heartfelt message, so Hawkeye goes for it.

He spreads hummus on a cracker and feeds it to BJ. They pick from a bunch of grapes, their knuckles brushing every time they go in for another, and when they get to the last one Hawkeye picks the empty bunch out of the hamper and holds it above his head.

“Finders keepers,” Hawkeye says.

“What about being courteous to your guest?”

“Do I look like a gracious host to you?”

BJ reaches across him and makes a grab for the stems and Hawkeye jerks it away. He loses balances and tumbles to the ground, and BJ lands over him, still reaching for the grape, but Hawkeye loses his grip while hysterically laughing and it lands in the sand. BJ has him pinned to the ground. Hawkeye swallows thickly and focuses on the bobbing of BJ’s Adam’s apple because he simply can’t look at him like this.

“Hey,” BJ says. “What if I kissed you?”

“What if you– why?”

“Why? What if I loved you? What if your lips were begging to be kissed?”

“I– I mean, you could if you wanted to.”

BJ doesn’t kiss him. He just peels himself off Hawkeye and lies back in the sand and puts his hands behind his head while Hawkeye tries not to spontaneously combust. It just… it couldn’t possibly mean anything, since BJ is not a part of that world, and this is how they always talk. How they’ve always talked.

Hawkeye is crazy, and he is in love, and if he can’t rationalize an explanation for BJ’s behavior that’s his problem. BJ traces a line down Hawkeye’s arm and gives him goosebumps. He ends by taking his hand and holding it in the sand between them. BJ squeezes it once and it’s like he’s responsible for all the blood pumping through Hawkeye’s system. Hawkeye bites the inside of his cheek to keep from doing anything stupid.

“What do you want to do today?” BJ asks him at the breakfast table, and after a while Hawkeye is finally used to that question.

“Do you have the paper, Dad? I wanna see what’s at the drive-in.”

Dad reads it before he hands it over. “You’re not gonna believe this, Hawk, but it’s your Gene Kelly picture again. Somebody working the reels there has a thing for ballet.”

“ _Your_ Gene Kelly picture?” BJ teases. Hawkeye snatches the paper from his dad.

“They play it for weeks at a time,” he says. “ _An American in Paris_. It must be the only color film they have.”

And so they find themselves at the drive-in, lounging on the hood of the car atop a flannel blanket with a bag of popcorn between them. Hawkeye looks over at BJ after every joke to make sure he’s enjoying himself and laughing at all the right times. He is. After a while he settles in and starts to relax. He even leans his head on BJ’s shoulder for a while before he gets a crick in his neck and has to sit back up. Eventually Gene Kelly is crooning by the Seine and BJ apparently decides this is the right time to have a side conversation.

“ _It’s very clear our love is here to stay._ ”

“Hawkeye, I need to talk to you.”

“ _Not for a year, forever and a day._ ”

“Shhhh, I love this scene. It’s almost as sentimental as I am.”

“Yeah. That’s kind of what I want to talk about. Would you look at me?” BJ sounds serious and an indescribable pit of dread erupts deep in Hawkeye’s stomach. He looks over.

“Listen,” BJ says. “I’m gonna tell you something, and you have to promise to take it seriously. I… I don’t know what I could swear on to make you believe me.”

“I don’t know. On Margaret’s lip gloss. On Radar’s teddy bear.” _On my mother’s grave_ , he thinks but doesn’t say. _Maudlin_.

“I’m in love with you.”

Hawkeye sits up. “This, again? You can’t be serious.”

“What, because I’m in love with you?”

“ _Please_ don’t play games with me, not– not like this.”

BJ looks hurt, but he doesn’t fight with him on it.

“You have to believe me. I don’t even– I don’t even care if you don’t feel the same way, I just– I had to say it. It has to be out there, just so you know. So it can be your move, now.”

“BJ, what? After all this, now– now? Now?”

BJ stands and takes him the shoulders. He looks straight into his eyes and Hawkeye is a hair’s breadth from believing him. 

“Yes, now,” he says. “Now and always, Hawk. Now and always.”

“Always? BJ? What are you talking about?”

“I– would you get in the car, Hawk? Let’s not talk out here.”

They pile into the backseat, both sitting crowded in the middle like the rest of the car isn’t there for them to spread out in. BJ takes Hawkeye’s left hand in his and holds it up like he’s proposing, but Hawkeye cuts him off before he can speak.

“You always do this, Beej! You– you project what you want, need, desire, whatever from Peg onto other people, but that can actually be pretty fucking painful when said other people might really, well–” he realizes he’d yanked his hand away so he could talk with it. “Well, it doesn’t matter. I let it, this, something, happen while we were over there and I won’t deny enjoying it or at least letting myself not be agonizedto death over it, but now we’re back home and you can have the real thing with any woman you want and that’s what you have to do.”

“Hawk–”

“Because you’re the family man, remember! Don’t pretend that I don’t know what you want, BJ Hunnicutt, because I fucking know you.” Hawkeye is so desperate for him to understand that his voice is cracking. “I won’t be the reason you deprive yourself of the life you deserve.”

“It’s you, Hawkeye! I want the life with you!”

Both of their gazes dart madly across the other’s face. BJ’s the one who makes the move. Hawkeye gasps as their lips meet and he grips BJ’s bicep in a desperate attempt to keep a hold on reality. BJ is also the one who pulls back, and he takes Hawkeye’s hand back and this time Hawkeye lets him talk.

“Hawkeye Pierce?” he says. “I love everything about you. Everything, even the things you think annoy people, like when you’re screaming and carrying on and kicking up shit, when you’re irrational and all over the place because that’s when you’re at the most _you_. Once I stopped– stopped lying to myself I was able to really appreciate that about you instead of letting it make me go mad with jealousy. And so I had to come and find you here like I found you there since I don’t know what I would’ve done without you and I don’t know what I would do without you now, and it’s everything. I love everything about you. I love you.”

“Jesus Christ, BJ,” he breathes. “I don’t know if I can take that.”

“Haven’t we been here before? How you know that, that you don’t let anyone tell you how much you mean to them?”

He doesn’t know if he can take it, but he’s going to give it a try. He nods. BJ reaches back over and kisses him again, passionate, and fast, and deep. A kiss years in the making. Their knees knock and slot together as they seemingly try and meld themselves into the one car seat, since who would expect anything else.

 _Oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god_.

“What, Hawk?”

He realizes he’d been saying that out loud. “It’s just– it’s hard for me to believe–” He gets himself together. “My heart is pounding. My– I can hear it in my ears, my hands are shaking. My knees, don’t even get me started on my knees, it’s a good thing we’re sitting or else they wouldn’t be keeping me up– You don’t understand, I’ve literally dreamt this moment–”

“Tell me about it,” BJ agrees. “So you love me?” He’s grinning like he’s won something.

“Yep. Yeah. Yes. Head over heels and everything.”

“No kidding.”

“For all eleven of the last three years,” Hawkeye nods. “It was only you.”

“Jesus Christ, Hawkeye, the whole time?”

Hawkeye has to be close to him. He pulls their faces together again and with BJ’s lips against his feels more free than he ever has in his entire life, and that’s saying something.

“Yes,” he practically whispers. “The whole time.”

Exit Trapper John, enter BJ Hunnicutt. Or so says Radar, when Hawkeye remembers to ask who’s the new guy they’re going to be picking up. He forgets the name about fifteen times during the drive, far too distracted by carefully picking the words he’ll have time to say to Trap before he boards his plane. Except when he gets there, Trap’s gone. Vanished, vamoosed, virtually evaporated straight out of existence with a proxy kiss on the cheek by way of a note. Sure. Fine. Whatever. _Fuck! What the hell does a guy gotta do to get a little–_

“Uh, Captain Pierce, sir? Captain Hunnicutt,” Radar introduces them.

“I missed Trapper by ten minutes, ten lousy minutes!”

“Captain Pierce,” says Hunnicutt.

“Hi. Can you believe that?”

“You couldn’t’ve droven any faster.”

“I let that geisha take one too many laps on my back.”

“Anything I can help with?”

“Huh?”

“Can I help?”

“No, no, no, forget it.”

Haewkeye doesn’t really look at the new guy, more through him. Hunnicutt-Schmunnicutt as far as he’s concerned; Trapper is gone and he left without saying goodbye and– _try not to spiral in front of the kids, dear_ , he tells himself, thinking of Radar. They try to go home, but naturally their jeep is missing and naturally Radar is freaking out.

“If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, you probably haven’t checked with your answering service,” Hawkeye rattles off. It’s an old joke, but it fits.

“Rudyard Kipling,” comes a voice from behind him. Hunnicutt… Hawkeye looks behind him. Hunnicutt? Hawkeye looks behind him again. Okay, so he’s on his level. Hawkeye thinks he can actually feel his heart rate decelerating as he’s calmed by the idea that although he looks the part, Captain Hunnicutt will not actually be another Frank Burns.

“Give that man a lady in the balcony,” he says, because he has to say something.

“Hey, listen, that jeep is government property!”

“So are you.”

“I never thought of it that way.”

“Pierce, I’m just a little confused,” Hunnicutt says with an air that shows he actually thinks this is the most absurd situation on the planet, which Hawkeye considers the bare minimum for sanity.

“Hawkeye. And don’t let a little confusion throw you, Captain.”

“BJ.” _Uh-huh_.

“One of the first things you learn over here, BJ, is that insanity is no worse than the common cold.” Making it highly contagious, so he’d be wise to stay away. That being said, Hawkeye is already regretting dismissing his presence so abruptly when they first met. He hopes his first impression didn’t ruin anything, since you can’t judge a guy from what he’s like just off the heels of a break-up. Or whatever.

He decides to buy BJ a drink, and then does whatever the opposite of regret that decision is when he riffs with him about Auto Club. This is– usually people will laugh at his jokes but it takes a different kind to join in. 

“Hey, I really wouldn’t want to get him in any trouble,” BJ says as Hawkeye plans to sneak Radar into the Officers Club.

“No problem. Just let me have some of your costume jewelry.”

“Uh, I’ve only had five weeks of indoctrination; is this what they call a field promotion?”

 _Ah. Very good, Doctor._ “For being brave and nearsighted above and beyond the call.” 

Then BJ just laughs as Hawkeye appoints Radar _corporal captain_ , and even more when he orders a grape Nehi.

“You married?” Hawkeye asks, since he’s gotta know.

“Mm-hmm.”

“You bring your wife with you?”

BJ smiles, very much in on the joke. “I thought I’d come ahead and check it out.”

Hawkeye is falling for him fast, even by his standards. Absolutely classic that he’s married.

“Hmm.”

“You married?” BJ asks him.

“Someone’s gonna have to get me pregnant first.” _Why did you say that??? You are going to scare him away, you fucking maniac._ Thankfully some empty seats materialize and they go to the bar. He toasts BJ and welcomes him to Korea and hopes he can tell just how sorry he is that he got sent here.

“Hawkeye. Why Hawkeye?”

 _I’m glad you asked. I think I want you to know everything about me_. He gives his _Mohicans_ spiel. A jet flies overhead.

“Feel like you just stepped into a time machine?”

“Two months ago, I’m in residency in Sausalito. Little house in Mill Valley. Peggy’s eight months pregnant.” _Oh, God_. “And they draft me. Five weeks training at Fort Sam Houston. Bunch of doctors, stumbling around in the dark, totally lost. Some idiot shooting live ammo over your head.”

“American plan.”

BJ nods. What a way to run a war. Hawkeye swears on everything he holds sacred that he will keep this man safe. 

That’s when things get interesting. Hawkeye thinks it took a few weeks, maybe even a few months, before Trapper pulled off a scheme with him. It wasn’t that he was against it on principle; Trap was just interested in keeping a low profile and getting in and out of there as soon as possible, which Hawkeye did not begrudge him. Eventually, though, he got just as fed up with things as Hawkeye did and after a while it took next to no convincing to get him wrapped up in a hare-brained scheme.

Not so with BJ. One glance. One glance and he’s right behind him all the way, lying to this random colonel that they’re intelligence men on a survey mission. BJ even looks impressed. In fact, BJ is an even better liar than he is, his voice not faltering for a moment as he slots himself perfectly into Hawkeye’s stupid little life, stupid little lie.

“Coleman Hawkins, right?”

“Right.”

_Marry me._

Okay, so Hawkeye might be falling in love with him. That much would be par for the course. But BJ seems to find Hawkeye captivating, too, he seems to trust him and Hawkeye isn’t sure why, but sometimes after he speaks he thinks BJ looks like he’s been waiting his whole life to hear what he just said.

 _Last of the Mohicans_ be damned. Hercules, Odysseus, Atlas, and Achilles be damned; Hawkeye never thought he belonged in a war story. But maybe it’s not. Long live Penelope. Long live Patroclus. Maybe it’s a love story. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So: “why don’t you bore a hole in yourself and let the sap run out” is from Horse Feathers and is a) basically gibberish and b) NOT romantic or even nice in any way but it would be the first thing that pops into hawkeye’s mind when he’s speechless. The dialogue at the end from 4x01 welcome to korea is from 4x01 welcome to korea. The end obviously inspired by fleabag’s “this is a love story” because I think it’s a hilarious application of it but also incredibly apt I mean come on, I can practically SEE hawkeye looking to the camera and saying “knuckle brush” 
> 
> This fic made possible by Paul Williams’ “surf music” which I listened to on repeat while writing it
> 
> I’m @crickelwood on Tumblr if you want to say hi!


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